Can A Person of Bad Character Become A Person of Good Character?

The Question the U.S. Presidential Election Poses

Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, it is time to ask some serious moral and theological questions.  Most of the campaign against the election of Donald Trump was based on some undeniable evidence of corrupt and sexually immoral character -- from several years ago.  Several prominent political figures deemed him to be "unfit" for the highest office in the nation. 

I am not a champion of Donald Trump, but I am a champion for biblical truth, and I feel compelled to challenge the belief that once a person is publically exposed as a person of bad character therefore that person's character has been permanently defined as "unfit, dangerous, scary, deplorable, evil."

This kind of thinking runs through every strata of society, which is why it needs to be challenged.  There are people who want to identify sexual predators, for example, to "lock them up and throw away the key."  Lest I be misunderstood, I am not advocating leniency for sexual predators.  I am simply pointing to an underlying belief system that says that persons of bad character cannot become persons of good character.  The evilness of their character is indelible and unchangeable.   "Once a sexual predator, always a sexual predator."

Here is a great irony:  In national elections, candidates appeal to the peoples' expressed desire for change.  But what kind of change can satisfy the human heart's desire for change?  If we do not believe in the capacity of people to undergo deep, personal transformation of their inner being from bad to good, then for what kind of change do we hope and expect? 

I am saying to all those who call themselves the followers of Jesus that there is no Gospel of the Kingdom apart from this faith and expectation that people of bad character can and must become people of good character.  It is at the heart of the biblical message.  Saul of Tarsus, a Jewish terrorist, who persecuted the church of God, described himself accurately as "the chief of sinners," but also as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the grace of God!  This very bad character became a very good character, and a central figure in the history of the church.  And he described this radical change in these words:  "I have been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."

The history of the church is only about people of bad character who became people of good character.  John 1:12 - "To all who received him, who believed on his name, he gave the power to become . . ."  It is our only hope -- that we can become something else.  And we can. 

Kum Ba Yah Revival

I'm an old dude. I was there when the Jesus People first starting singing the African song, Kum Ba Yah. I was a young pastor, playing a folk guitar. Something profoundly new happened with the young people of the church in those days. The singing of that song took us into a place of profound peace and a new sense of spiritual reality. We didn't know what to call it then. None of us had read Brother Lawrence yet. But we were having our first experience of "practicing the presence of the Lord."

Every once in awhile, I hear some person, usually a clergy-type, refer to the song, "Kum Ba Yah". It is invariably said with disdain, as if the worst thing we could do is sit around singing "Kum Ba Yah". The ridicule is mean to discourage us from ever going back to that. I partly understand that. The song provided a form that once represented a treasured experience, namely, the experience of the presence of the Lord. And our longing for His Presence, ah -- His Presence! -- can draw us back to old forms, looking again for what one of my friends calls "the magic we knew."

I have been in gatherings of people who once tasted the wonderful sense of His Presence, but never went on to spiritual maturity, never went on to sing a new song (there is good reason that the Psalmists enjoin us to do that). They continue to sing "Kum Ba Yah" trying to recreate the experience (we're not quite sure what that was), but all it is now is a tired old song full of sentiment. Sentiment is not the same thing as vibrant life, the vibrant life we once experienced when we sang that song. We can find ourselves "holding to the outward form of our religion, while rejecting the real power of it."

Nevertheless, I want to address the scoffing and mocking voices who would discourage us from "sitting around a campfire, holding hands, and singing Kum Ba Yah." I woke up in the middle of the night from a light sleep and a sort of dream, almost a waking dream if you know what I mean. I was hearing voices around me singing quietly. The words were not immediately important. What I felt was an intense yearning of radical believers to enter into the presence of the Lord, and stay there. The music was rich, warm, harmonious -- African sounding. And then I recognized it as a new variation of that old song, "Kum Ba Yah." I sensed that heaven was talking. It's time for a Kum Ba Yah revival.

Kum Ba Yah is a song of a suffering people whose only respite from trouble is the presence of the Lord. When fear is all around, there is a deep need to find rest in a place where our trust can be restored in Him to live another day. We are on the verge of a great awakening, and a mighty spiritual battle, and the only song, the only prayer that will see us through is some version of "Lord, come by us, come by here." I saw it this summer when our national Vineyard gathered in Kitchener, Ontario, and our new national director, David Ruis, led us in a new version of Psalm 23, a song he wrote called "Lead On". It was at once both a marching song and a resting song, a "presence of the Lord song." Sometimes we hummed the song, other times we sang it, but it went home with us. I still sing it quietly to myself when I want to rest and be restored in His Presence.

As warriors come back, victorious but bruised and bloody from battle, we will need to sit around our fires, hold hands, and sing our Kum Ba Yah songs once again. A revived sense of the presence of the Lord must undergird the revival of the church militant and the coming of the Kingdom of the Lord. Let's be careful how we speak about "Kum Ba Yah."

Kum ba yah my Lord
Kum ba yah
Kum ba yah my Lord
Kum ba yah
Kum ba yah my Lord
Kum ba yah
O Lord kum ba yah

Religion vs. Science in Medicine

I hate relgion vs. science debates because most of them pit creationism against Darwinism.  Frankly, none of it seems to make any difference in my daily life.

But there is a religion vs. science debate that has barely begun, but one which has an enormous impact on my daily life, and the life of everyone I know.  It concerns the science of medicine (referring to all the healing arts) as opposed to the religion of medicine.

I have, throughtout my life, enlisted the services of all kinds of allopathic physicians:  Family practice doctors, vascular surgeons, cardiologists, rheumatologits, podiatrists, urologists, plastic surgeons, internists, ophthalmologists, and dentists.  For the most part, I am grateful for their services.  I'm sure a couple of them probably saved me from an early death or the disabilities from a stroke.  I am also grateful to have had my eyesight restored.  I am grateful for the extraordinary diagnostics that our conventional system has made available to us.  And if I were ever in a serious accident, I would be grateful for the excellent trauma care.

I have also enlisted the services of chiropractors, microscopists for live blood analysis, nutritional consultants, naturopathic physicians, and a few other "non-conventional" healthcare givers.  I am also grateful for their services.

The thing that concerns me is the apparent unwillingness of allopathic physicians to acknowledge their religion that interferes with their science.  By religion, I do not mean faith in a supreme being, but rather a blind devotion to a small "g" god, whose attributes are wealth and power.  The allopathic system resides primarily in the pharmaceutical and processed foods industry, which through threats, extortion, and bribery has learned to control every branch of government and education that was designed to protect our health.  People can be bought these days are bargain basement prices.

This "beast" of a system has learned to prescribe a "standard of care" to which all of its bondslaves must adhere.  When I visit my family doctor and tell him of other therapies I am using, he immediately seeks to indoctrinate me by calling these other approaches "quackery."   I refuse to be intimdated.

Once, when I told him about a live blood analysis, he pulled out the "quackery" card again.  I asked him if he'd ever seen one.  "No," he admitted.  I said I had my most recent one on video.  If I brought it in, would he watch it.  He agreed.  It would be unscientific not to.  Two weeks later, I went back to pick it up.  "So, what did you think?" I asked.  "Very interesting.  What do those slides tell you?"  I explained a few things and he said, "They don't teach us those things in medical school."  Exactly.  But you can't learn from those quacks because you adhere to a different religion, a different body of values and beliefs.

I heard a surgeon on television say that only about ten percent of allopathic medicine is effective.  The other ninety per cent should be treated in ways other than surgery, drugs, or radiation.  Hippocrates, the father of medicine, would agree:  "Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine your food."  How many people do I know whose lives have been destroyed with psychiatric drugs?  How many people do I know who became disabled for life through failed back surgeries? 

The allopathic medical system has its whistle blowers, and they pay a hefty price to tell the truth.  I appreciate the candor of  those oncologists (about 80%) who, in two different surveys, admitted that they would never accept chemotherapy for themselves or any member of their family.  And yet, why do they prescribe chemotherapy to their patients?  This is where religion comes in.  Follow the money.  In this god we trust.  The pharmaceutical companies richly reward their bondslaves.

Anyone who has watched "Burzinsky, the Movie" knows that there are effective cures for several kinds of cancer, but those who will not bow to the "beast" will be opposed and persecuted all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.   Burzinsky is only the bravest and toughest of many, and a brilliant videographer took an interest in his story.  The religion is a blind faith in the allopathic medical establishment to always tell us the truth, to do no harm, and to heal us.  Unfortunately, that is too often not the case.  The religious devotion to profit, power, and control has perpetrated a huge delusion and  destroyed the science. 

Good Friday - The Passion of the Christ

This morning, as I lay in bed, I told the Lord that I would like to spend a good part of the day with Him, but I didn't know how I would like to do that. Our own church, which only has use of a gymnasium on the weekends, would not have a gathering until Saturday night, an Easter vigil, and I had dismissed the possibility of attending a neighborhood church as a visitor.

The thought came quickly and clearly to mind that I should go to our basement entertainment centre where I could be alone, and watch Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". After having seen it in 2005, I hadn't watched it since, and I had almost forgotten that I possessed a copy of the DVD until I came across it two days ago.

My initial response to the thought was ambivalence. While the idea seemed totally appropriate for Good Friday, I felt a bit of revulsion. The film moved me deeply the first time I saw it. It moved me in the sense that I deeply empathized with His sufferings and experienced it as suffering myself. I had seen it a second time a few months later, and I discovered that it was no easier to watch then.

I almost resolved to do something else with my Good Friday quiet time, but then I realized that I needed to resist the temptation to turn away from suffering. I needed to engage the suffering of my Jesus, if only through a dramatic re-enactment of that suffering. Why? Because to fully embrace His suffering is one and the same with embracing, and thereby sharing the suffering of the world He came to love and save. If He came to partake of our sufferings, then surely I could vicariously partake of His sufferings for 126 minutes!

I prepared everything so that I could experience the drama uninterrupted. As the screenplay progressed, I discovered that I was once again drawn into the suffering with a high degree of sensitivity. What do I mean by that? It simply means that I am aware of how de-sensitized I can be to suffering. If we dare to watch the evening news, we are encountered every few seconds with a new murder, a fatal accident, or some grave injustice. We were clearly not created to endure so much pain, so we learn to somehow distance ourselves from the reality of the suffering and simply receive it as information. Not so with the sufferings of Jesus. Even though He is portrayed by an actor in a drama, nevertheless He is so personally real to me that the symbol became reality and I was swept into the suffering myself -- again! For His sake and for my sake, I wanted the cruelty and the unimaginable torment to end. But it went on and on.

I remember thinking critically at my first viewing of the film, a large but private preview with local church leaders, that the scenes of suffering were excessive, and overdone. I was protesting at the inaccuracy of biblical detail. Thirty-nine lashes does not mean sixty-nine! And why did he fall so many times on the way to Golgotha? And did the Roman soldiers really laugh and take sadistic delight all the way through the scourging and the crucifixion? Where is that in the Bible?

Today, I had some of those same thoughts go through my mind, but they were quieter this time. Now I was seeing another dimension to the drama that I had not fully appreciated before. This time I saw more clearly than ever the demonic power behind the tormentors, and this is what Gibson meant to dramatize. When the leaders of Israel aligned themselves with Rome, saying, "We have no King but Caesar. Crucify Him!" I saw how the dragon and the beast and the false prophet of Revelation were venting their full wrath on the Son of God.

I saw that Satan and his allies would do everything they could to turn Jesus away from total, complete, final obedience to death, even death on a cross. And I saw the determination of my Lord Jesus to take whatever suffering and abuse He had to endure in order to take away the sins of the world and release us from the legal hold of the devil. I not only saw His sufferings, I saw His love. "This is how we know what love is, that Christ laid down His life for us (I Jn 3:16)."

When I saw the film the first time, I remember that it brought me to prayer, but I can't remember what I prayed. When I saw the film the second time, I remember that it also brought me to prayer, but I don't remember what I prayed. Today, for the third time, it brought me to prayer once again. This time the prayer is fresh in my mind. I could only say, over and over again, "Oh Lord, I am not worthy to be called your disciple -- a follower of Jesus. I am not worthy."

Heart Reflections

I had a heart attack this summer. It happened while our "clan" was taking a holiday together, on the day of my oldest son's 36th birthday, June 14th. I had to spend a week in the Kelowna Hospital after my angiogram to wait for an ambulance transport to Vancouver, where they did the angioplasty. That week of waiting was hard in some ways, but very beneficial. It afforded the opportunity for some very serious and at times tearful conversations with my wife, Ruth, about what we had done with our lives, and what we would do with the rest of our lives --- should we live and be able to do anything.

It helps to get in touch with one's mortality in such a profound way. You realize how precious your personal allotment of time is, and potentially how little of it may be left. I've been wanting to get focused for quite awhile, and this experience forced the issue. I believe that the most important thing, and potentially the most rewarding thing that I could do is to pour myself into raising up the next generation of leaders within the church. That's not real easy to define. I have used the word "mentoring," but that could take many forms and be very broad in its application. What I really want to be free of is all the adminstrative work that comes with overseeing regional and national affairs.

In addition to pouring myself into emerging leaders in face-to-face encounters, either one-on-one or in groups, I would also like to put my thoughts about church leadership into the form of a book. I really would like to leave behind some worthwhile things that people could read or hear for some time after I'm dead. There are many people who tell me I have valuable things to share, and I tend to think it's true. That's less a thought than a fire in my gut. It feels like something needs to be shared before it's too late.

Refreshment - Where?

As I was driving home with Ruth from a meeting the other night, I was reflecting on some health problems and a general sense of weariness. Ruth saw a connection between vulnerability to sickness and the weariness, and so she encouraged me to stop working so much, and spend time refreshing myself.

This is a huge dilemma for me. The things that used to refresh me I can no longer do because of the arthritis that has impacted most of my body: Swimming, tennis, running, walking, motorcycles, waterskiing are all out of the picture. I do embrace the practice of using a stationary bike, a stair master, and some small free weights for cardio, mobility, and strength. But because of the condition of my legs, I tend to mostly sit. And while I'm sitting, it seems a terribly draining thing to watch television or movies, unless those movies are exceptionally good. And so, while I sit, I like to do something positive, productive, helpful to others, and even personally satisfying. So I end up sitting. Where? In front of my computer --- working. Some of it feels like work, but much of it brings a sense of satisfaction about being creative through writing, connected with friends and family through correspondence, or just plain "caught up" with bookkeeping and financial affairs. I guess it also represents an escape from the pain I feel when I think about being physically limited. Simply said, it keeps my mind off of it.

The downside is that doing anything on a computer is, by definition, non-social, and often perceived as anti-social. I don't like the impact that this has on our marriage, or on the relationships with my kids and grandkids. But I'm having a very hard time finding alternatives. It would be helpful to find other people who have dealt with similar frustrations and found some happy solutions.

Freedom

In the last several months, I have seen, more clearly than ever, that our ability to function in human relationships is most severely impaired when we embrace lies about ourselves --- Lies that have come to us through others, lies that we impose on ourselves, and lies that have been reinforced and empowered by the Father of Lies.

Those lies become our prison, and we cannot move beyond their walls until we acknowledge that the lies are there, and that we empower them by believing them. I've also become convinced that the only way out of that prison is to ask Jesus, who is Truth, to expose the lies, demolish the lies, and replace them with truth. And that truth is only clearly known by the One who fashioned us in His own image. The truth about us cannot be found in any other source than our Creator.

In the simplest way possible, this describes the struggle between light and darkness that we find in the Gospel of John and in the 1st letter of John in the New Testament. Jesus is the light that shines into our darkness.

I also think the simplicity of this is what proves to be most scandalous to us when we are deceived. We think, "It can't be that easy." But what is easy about facing delusions and desiring, at all costs, to know the truth and be free?