Category Archives: Evangelism

Spirit-filled Ancestors

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All of us have heard testimonies of people with difficult pasts who’ve somehow, against all odds, turned their lives around. They might have had a history of dreadful choices or even a rap sheet a mile long, but for many of them the turnaround came after connecting with Christ.

As often as not, their testimonies include a statement like this: “My grandmother prayed for me for decades, and God finally answered.”

If we could piece together our family trees for many generations back, all of us would probably find that God’s representatives had been placed in strategic places all along, to pray for their families. Some even prayed for “those yet unborn,” which would include us.

My sister has done an excellent job as our “Family Historian,” keeping memorabilia safe and well categorized in labeled storage bins. She’s amassed everything from diplomas and photographs to wedding gowns, jewelry, infant-wear, and letters.

Ancestor albums

Several years ago a family friend, Sally, offered to go through Mary’s bins and condense everything into two 9” x 12” albums, one for Dad’s side of the family and one for Mom’s. She scanned or photographed everything so that even bulky items morphed into crisp, flat notebook pages. She also typed up old hand-written letters, some over 100 years old, to place alongside originals, which in some cases included translations from other languages.

Sally also added official census records rewritten from hard-to-read official documents to legible charts. These pages take account of birth dates and all known addresses, emigration and immigration dates, occupations, marriages, children’s birth and death dates, causes of death where known, burial locations, and an all-inclusive family tree.

Recently I’ve spent time with my distant relatives via these two family albums, going on a hunt for God-sightings through the 5 generations represented. And what I learned is God establishes his Spirit somewhere in every family tree.

Youthful Carl Johansson

For example, my paternal grandfather (Carl Johan Johansson) came to America in 1886 as a 19 year old laborer with a homemade wooden box of tools, and he brought Jesus Christ with him. By the end of his 68 years, he’d married, fathered four children, had become a building contractor and finally the vice president of a Chicago bank. He died 10 years before I was born, so we never met, except through these albums.

Taking in the details of his life, which of course include my own father’s 1899 birth, has been a satisfying exercise that’s made me grateful for God’s involvement in this “old world” family, my family. Sally’s charted numbers have told a non-numerical story of personal lows and highs similar to the lives of today’s families. And God is in the details.

Older Carl Johansson (Johnson)

But most importantly, when Carl Johannson’s death date had been written into the record books, God’s Spirit lived on within him.

(Tomorrow: the life he lived)

“Remember your Creator… before the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7)

Ready and Waiting

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In the New Testament when children joyfully referred to Jesus as the Messiah, the religious rulers of the day were incensed that he didn’t stop them. Instead he did just the opposite: “Don’t you read your Bibles?” he said. “From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise.” He was telling them, “These youngsters get me, and you don’t.” (Matthew 21:16)

How did those children become that devoted to Jesus? They were so sure about honoring him that they went against powerful local authorities without blinking an eye. How do we cultivate such certain faith in ourselves and in our children?

Hmmm...

Last night I received an email from our firstborn, Nelson, with some interesting thoughts about “signing on” with Jesus as Lord of our lives. He wrote about our natural reluctance to cooperate when the Lord directs us to move in his direction. Then, when we’re finally ready to comply, we do so only “little by little.” What Nelson said next gave me a new way to think about that, not from a human perspective but from the Lord’s.

Some of us, reluctant to step toward God, say, “But I’m still waiting on him,” and Scripture definitely encourages that kind of waiting. It’s possible, though, that when we say we’re “waiting on him,” it’s just a ploy to procrastinate on making a difficult change he’s already asked us to make.

Nelson wrote, “Funny how we sometimes get that mixed around, saying that we are ‘waiting on God.’ I think he’s waiting on us much more of the time, ready to bless us and move us to the next thing. God is ready. We are not.”

His words rolled around in my head for a long time, statements that were well-put and truthful.

In thinking about the scriptural children honoring Jesus with their words, we Christian parents think of our own children and how important it is to us that they one day choose to follow Jesus. We spend unnumbered hours praying to that end, and we take them to church, grill them on Bible memory verses, pay for Christian summer camps, and do our best to live Christian-ly in front of them. But sometimes children choose a different path anyway.

Though that saddens us, we should never despair. As Nelson wrote, all of us can be slow to walk in God’s ways. The good news is that he is always ready, whenever any of us steps even slightly in his direction. He is thoroughly prepared to bless us, and we’ll never have to stand waiting on him once we’ve come to the point of willing surrender. He’s already there, waiting on us… and our children. He wants all of us to come, and he looks forward to hearing “words of praise from our lips.”

None of it, however, happens on our timetables or through the circumstances we dictate. As Nelson wrote, “God often works in ways we don’t expect.” But one thing we know for sure: he is always ready and waiting for us.

“Honor the Messiah as Lord in your hearts.” (1 Peter 3:15)

Selfish or Selfless?

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My little house has 3 bedrooms: one large, one medium, and one closet-sized. We’ve taken the large bedroom and made it more like a camp cabin, putting the emphasis on sleeping space.

The room has a variety of beds with one king, one double, one twin, one twin-size floor mat, room for another twin in the closet and two mattresses stuffed under existing beds. Although there are ample blankets and pillows (at one point I counted 32 pillows), once in a while there are still problems.

“I need a flat pillow… a fluffy one… one without feathers.”

Or, “Where’s my favorite pillow?”

As the pillows get passed around, “favorites” get lost. Since I’m lucky enough to sleep in a different room, I have charge of my own favorite pillow. But one day I decided to choose (and hide) a spare, just in case.

I plucked one of the best pillows from the pile with just the right depth and feel, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and stashed it under my bed. That way, if anyone “borrowed” my bed pillow and failed to return it, my back-up would be ready. And then I promptly forgot about it.

Stashed

Several years passed until yesterday, when I was in a cleaning frenzy and decided to pull everything out from under my dressers and bed. There were old Christmas cards, sandals, a bin of papers, extension cords, a folded rug, boots…. and my pillow. I hadn’t even remembered it was there.

The pillow was still clean and in great condition, but as I pulled it out of the bag, it struck me what a waste it had been to stuff it under my bed like that. Truthfully, it was selfish and might even have qualified as hoarding, which is “to accumulate a supply of something that’s hidden or carefully guarded for preservation or future use.”

That’s exactly what I was doing with my pillow. If I was a squirrel, hoarding would have been commendable, but in my case, I was just refusing to share.

A pillow may be a small thing, and we had 31 others people were able to use. But the principle of withholding something good so others can’t use it and saving it for self is a serious fault.

Even more important than sharing a pillow, however, is sharing the other things God gives us, like spiritual blessings. For example, if we’re saved by Jesus, we should eagerly introduce him to others. If we’ve been given spiritual insights, we should willingly share them. And if we have opportunities to serve someone in need, we should offer to do so. Spiritual blessings that are hoarded put us in disobedience to the Lord.

But God knows that sometimes sharing is really hard. Once in a while it goes against our natural leanings so significantly that it’s a major sacrifice to do it. But that’s what makes it valuable to him and important for us. In my case, maybe it would be easier to share if I looked at every selfish impulse in the light of God’s opinion.

If I did, I know I’d never again stuff a pillow under my bed.

“Do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” (Hebrews 13:16)