Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Insights from the Carpool





I used to carpool to work with my dad and his identical twin brother. My uncle would pick us up in his dark blue Chevy Suburban and together the three of us would drive downtown to our respective work places. My uncle is a slow driver. He enjoys the ride. He revels in the conversation. Being with him is like sitting on a sunny patio with a cold drink on a summer afternoon. It’s easy to wile away the time, laughing at his jokes and then wonder where the day went.

One winter morning when the snow was wet and clinging, he missed a sign forbidding right turns onto a residential street during rush hour. A cop was lurking nearby and promptly pulled him over. The police officer seemed abashed for giving him the ticket when the sign was covered in snow but explained (somewhat defensively, it seemed to me in the backseat) the danger of right-turning traffic between the hours of seven and nine in the morning. Unflappable as ever, my uncle nodded and said in his affable, Jeff Bridges-like manner. “Hey, it’s important to catch the evil doers.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘evil’,” the cop responded with rehearsed professionalism. “Just someone who, for a variety of reasons, happened to make a mistake at a particular point in time.”

Funny how words go out of fashion, isn’t it? Even when used self-deprecatingly for the sake of a dry rejoinder, ‘evil’ is out of fashion. Instead we must prevaricate and couch all of our words in semantic bubble wrap to avoid labels and judgements that some might find offensive. But if social media has taught us anything, it is that offence is an recreational sport.

Winston Churchill once opined, “You have enemies? Good! It means you stood up for something, sometime in your life.” 

God didn’t give us our lives in order that we might learn to walk so softly so as to never bend a blade of grass, but rather that we would bear witness to the truth. Being a witness sounds passive, but it is the furthest thing from it. It is about overcoming evil. It sounds a little hyperbolic to word it like that, but it is true according to Revelation 12:11. When Christians bear witness to the Truth it will undoubtably rustle up some enemies. Not the flesh and blood kind, though; but rather the ones that lurk in this present darkness beyond the sight of our natural eyes. Spiritual forces, who know better than we do, the power of our individual proclamation of what Christ has done. Those same spirits who seek to render us mute, lest the people who make up the Church comprehend that in worshipping our God; in declaring His greatness; in proclaiming His faithfulness to each of us personally, that He displays His might and our enemies are routed.

It is easy to reduce the notion of witnessing down to telling someone about how you became a Christian, as though the story ended at conversion, rather than began there. But whenever we tell anyone—even other believers—what Christ is accomplishing in our lives; how He is revealing the truth of His Word in our individual circumstances; how He is transforming us by His grace, we triumph over evil by the word of our testimony. The blood of the Lamb is already over the threshold of victory.  Whenever we testify as to what God is doing, even if it is only to our own selves, we overcome evil. We conquer by believing and speaking. In order to secure this triumph, we are only required to keep our eyes fixed on Christ; proclaiming as trustworthy witnesses the evidence we have seen.

Because hey, it’s important to catch the evil doers.



(A version of this article was published in the July/Aug 2018 issue of Live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com.)

I Wouldn’t Answer Me Either

“He does me double wrong that wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue.”   -William Shakespeare, Richard II,  (Act III, Scene II) I ...