Thanks for your comments and stories on my recent blog about hearing from God. Here is one of my own encounters that occurred through a dream or, more accurately, through a nightmare.
In my dream, I was strapping a 4-year old Chinese girl into a car seat. Don’t ask me how I knew that she was 4 years old – that’s just the way dreams are.
At any rate, I knew also that this was not a car seat. It was actually an electric chair and I was strapping the little girl in because the authorities had ordered her execution. Like many of my dreams where I’m trying to accomplish some task, I could not quite get it done. I’d fasten one latch and discover that there were two more that needed my attention. I’d work on those only to find that another one had come undone. Then, I’d decide that I needed to take the whole seat out of the car and start over. This went on interminably.
But my state of mind in this dream was much more importantly than this Sisyphusian task I was trying to accomplish. The whole time that I was trying to get this girl strapped into the seat, I was massively conflicted and anxious. I kept telling myself that I had to stop this. I kept saying to myself, “This little girl could not possibly have done anything that makes her worthy of death. She does not deserve to die.” I kept repeating this over and over, “She does not deserve to die.”
After a long struggle, both physically to get my task done and emotionally to deal with the trauma of what was happening, I woke up. My heart was racing and I was sweating and I experienced that relief that it was only a dream. But as the relief of “it’s only a dream” started to calm me down, God said, “Mike, millions of people are dying around the world each year that don’t deserve to die.”
There are two important things to know about this. First, when I say that God spoke to me, I do not mean that I heard an audible voice. This was a thought in my mind but I somehow recognized it as having an origin outside of myself. I want to say that it was an “implanted” thought. It was disconnected with anything I was thinking. I was not thinking about the dream or analyzing it or asking myself what it was about.
The second thing about this statement is that it was said to me in a matter-of-fact way. It did not come with any sense of judgment or condemnation – it was not as if God was saying, “millions of innocents are dying and you don’t give a rat’s ass about it”. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t even sad which seems very strange to me but I’m just trying to be accurate in my reporting. It was simply a statement about reality.
Perhaps because it did not come with any shame or guilt or anger, it did not throw up any barriers in me. So I said, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” God said, “Give $x per month to Opportunity International.
Opportunity International is an organization that I’ve known about for many years and a group Debi and I have supported in the past. They are involved in microfinance as a way to alleviate poverty and hunger and oppression in the developing world. I love their model because money they raised is used repeatedly – it is loaned and repaid and loaned again. I also love it because it is more of a “teach a person to fish instead of give a person a fish” approach.
The “x” dollars per month was not some massive, sacrificial amount. It did not require taking out a 2nd mortgage on the house or telling the kids that they needed to drop out of college. I probably spend more than “x” dollars each month on fast food.
I want you to know that I’m a lousy giver. I am so far from being any kind of role model in this area. If I was a presidential candidate and was asked about my greatest moral failure (as in the recent Rick Warren forum with McCain and Obama), money/financial/giving issues would have to be in my top ten list. But this particular giving has a whole different feel. I enjoy it as much as I do spending money on some consumer product.
And this incident has become more than just an encounter with God. It has become a paradigm for me of a relationship-based, experiential approach to knowing God instead of just a principles-based approach to faith. I learn from the Bible that giving is a good thing. There are many biblical principles related to giving. But no matter how many principles I learn, the Bible can never tell me what to give and where to give. After all, there is massive need. I regularly run into people who are raising money for good and noble causes. What do I do with all these requests? I’ve decided that all I can do is walk with the God in an intimate and personal and conversational relationship and get involved in those things that he calls me to.
If you’ve had these types of encounters with God, I’m interested in hearing about them. Share your stories with us.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Hearing from God
Lily Tomlin makes an interesting observation when she says, “Why is it when we talk to God we are said to be praying, and when God talks to us we're said to be schizophrenic?”
Does God speak to you? Of course, most Christians would say that God speaks to them through the Bible. God reveals things about himself through his written word.
But that is not what I’m talking about. I’m asking if you experience the kinds of personal encounters with God that are described in the Bible. God tells Samuel to appoint David as king. God tells Joseph to take the infant Jesus to Egypt because powerful people are out to kill him. God tells Ananias to deliver a message to Saul about the acute case of blindness that befell him a few days earlier.
My own thinking about this matter has been shifting in recent years. Here is a bit of my own journey related to this issue.
I became a Christian in the early 1970s in an environment that valued loving God with your mind. Good theology and right doctrine were emphasized and rightly so. As C. S. Lewis said, “Theology means the ‘science of God’ and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available.” (Chapter 1 of Book 4 of Mere Christianity)
On the other hand, this tradition in which I became a believer tended to distrust any claim of a personal encounter with God. My mentors explained to me that God did not speak to people anymore outside of illuminating them to understand his written word. Prior to the Bible being completed, God had to communicate with people directly. Now that the Bible was complete, they argued, this type of communication was no longer needed.
Similar logic was used to argue that speaking in tongues and miraculous healings and prophetic utterances had also passed away with the completion of God’s written revelation. These things were only needed to give credibility to the original apostles and those who were first preaching the message of Christ. Those of you with theological training will recognize the standard “Cessationist” position I was being taught.
This outlook was just fine with me. People who claimed to experience God were weird. They were slick televangelists who were obvious charlatans or super emotional people who babbled incoherently and claimed it was speaking in tongues. The Cessastionist position seemed reasonable.
In the last few years however, I’ve been rethinking this. While there are a lot of differences between the Old and New Testaments, one consistent pattern is that God engages people in a personal and intimate conversation about their lives and the circumstances in which they find themselves.
God spoke to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Gideon and on and on and on throughout the Old Testament.
This pattern continues into the New Testament:
Simeon is told that he will not die until he has seen the Messiah.
God spoke to the magi and to Joseph about Herod’s evil intent.
God spoke to Paul on the Damascus Road.
God gave Ananias a message to give to Paul.
God spoke to Paul about going to Asia Minor.
God spoke to the Antioch church about sending Paul and Barnabas on a mission trip.
God spoke to Peter about Cornelius and the gentiles.
God spoke to Phillip about chatting with the Ethiopian eunuch.
The phrases "the word of the Lord", "the Lord spoke", "the Lord said", "God spoke" and "God said” occur almost 700 times in the Bible. In some cases, the references are clearly to the written word of God. However, the vast majority of these passages record encounters with God where God “speaks” personally with individuals or groups outside of his written word. It is also interesting to note the way in which God speaks in these personal encounters. Occasionally the means are overtly supernatural like the appearance of an angel or an audible voice. I think this confused me for quite a long time. I did not experience such dramatic encounters.
But more recently I began to notice that the vast majority of God’s encounters with human beings related in the Bible leave the means of God’s communication unspecified or attribute it to something “natural” like a dream. A good example of God speaking by unspecified means is Judges 7:2-11 where God communicates with Gideon about the upcoming battle with Midian. Another example is I Samuel 23 where David “inquired of the Lord” whether he should go to battle against the Philistines and “the Lord answered him and said …” These examples are the norm rather than the exception.Thus, a straight forward reading of this biblical evidence makes it easy to believe that: (1) It is NORMAL for God to speak to his people on a REGULAR basis through personal encounters and private revelations and (2) Most of these encounters do not involve overtly supernatural means like an audible voice or the appearance of an angel but involve natural phenomenon like dreams or an inner voice.
With this biblical basis for believing that God still speaks today, I began to seek out credible examples of this supernatural and personal encounter with the living God.
A friend told me to visit Lookout Mountain Community Church. Within their church, they have a group of trained, lay ministers with prophetic gifts. These people will meet with you and pray for you and tell you things that God is revealing to them about you – things that God wants you to know about what he is doing in your life.
I met with three of these people one evening and it was very profound. They told me things about myself that God was revealing to them – things that were completely true about me and things they had no way of knowing since I was a total stranger to them. They were telling me these things within two minutes of meeting me and knowing nothing about me other than my first name. Furthermore, I’ve had friends that have had similar, credible experiences with these prophetically gifted people at LMCC.
The next step on this journey was getting reintroduced to Jack Deere. Jack was peripherally involved in my becoming a Christian in the 1970s. He was attending Dallas Seminary at the time and was widely recognized as a bright light and a rising star in Evangelical circles. Dallas Seminary was a stronghold of Cessationist thinking and Jack fit right in. When he graduated, he was asked to stay on as a professor and he did just that.
In the mid 1980s however, Jack began to have some encounters with overtly supernatural phenomenon. A man he greatly admired came to a church Jack was leading and conducted a healing service where people Jack knew were healed of chronic aliments. God gave revelations to people that resulted in the resolution of long-standing emotional wounds. Demonic activity became manifested and the demons were driven out. Despite his theology that said that such things no longer happened, Jack could not deny that they were happening right in the midst of his own church.
Over a two year period, Deere came to realize that his theology on this matter had been wrong. His change of theology led to his dismissal from Dallas Seminary. Jack wrote two books on his journey entitled Surprised by the Holy Spirit and Surprised by the Voice of God. They were enormously helpful to me for a number of reasons: (1) I knew Jack personally, (2) He had impeccable theological credentials, (3) He had been a skeptic of the overtly supernatural.
Two other authors have been very helpful. Dallas Willard’s book entitled Hearing God was insightful. And several books by John Eldredge have given me helpful guidance.
In coming posts on this blog, I’ll share some of the encounters that have come from this shift in my thinking on this matter.
But, for the moment, I’m very interested in your own stories. Has God spoken to you about the details and circumstances of your own life? Can you share them with us? Are you willing to be labeled as a schizophrenic?!
Does God speak to you? Of course, most Christians would say that God speaks to them through the Bible. God reveals things about himself through his written word.
But that is not what I’m talking about. I’m asking if you experience the kinds of personal encounters with God that are described in the Bible. God tells Samuel to appoint David as king. God tells Joseph to take the infant Jesus to Egypt because powerful people are out to kill him. God tells Ananias to deliver a message to Saul about the acute case of blindness that befell him a few days earlier.
My own thinking about this matter has been shifting in recent years. Here is a bit of my own journey related to this issue.
I became a Christian in the early 1970s in an environment that valued loving God with your mind. Good theology and right doctrine were emphasized and rightly so. As C. S. Lewis said, “Theology means the ‘science of God’ and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available.” (Chapter 1 of Book 4 of Mere Christianity)
On the other hand, this tradition in which I became a believer tended to distrust any claim of a personal encounter with God. My mentors explained to me that God did not speak to people anymore outside of illuminating them to understand his written word. Prior to the Bible being completed, God had to communicate with people directly. Now that the Bible was complete, they argued, this type of communication was no longer needed.
Similar logic was used to argue that speaking in tongues and miraculous healings and prophetic utterances had also passed away with the completion of God’s written revelation. These things were only needed to give credibility to the original apostles and those who were first preaching the message of Christ. Those of you with theological training will recognize the standard “Cessationist” position I was being taught.
This outlook was just fine with me. People who claimed to experience God were weird. They were slick televangelists who were obvious charlatans or super emotional people who babbled incoherently and claimed it was speaking in tongues. The Cessastionist position seemed reasonable.
In the last few years however, I’ve been rethinking this. While there are a lot of differences between the Old and New Testaments, one consistent pattern is that God engages people in a personal and intimate conversation about their lives and the circumstances in which they find themselves.
God spoke to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Gideon and on and on and on throughout the Old Testament.
This pattern continues into the New Testament:
Simeon is told that he will not die until he has seen the Messiah.
God spoke to the magi and to Joseph about Herod’s evil intent.
God spoke to Paul on the Damascus Road.
God gave Ananias a message to give to Paul.
God spoke to Paul about going to Asia Minor.
God spoke to the Antioch church about sending Paul and Barnabas on a mission trip.
God spoke to Peter about Cornelius and the gentiles.
God spoke to Phillip about chatting with the Ethiopian eunuch.
The phrases "the word of the Lord", "the Lord spoke", "the Lord said", "God spoke" and "God said” occur almost 700 times in the Bible. In some cases, the references are clearly to the written word of God. However, the vast majority of these passages record encounters with God where God “speaks” personally with individuals or groups outside of his written word. It is also interesting to note the way in which God speaks in these personal encounters. Occasionally the means are overtly supernatural like the appearance of an angel or an audible voice. I think this confused me for quite a long time. I did not experience such dramatic encounters.
But more recently I began to notice that the vast majority of God’s encounters with human beings related in the Bible leave the means of God’s communication unspecified or attribute it to something “natural” like a dream. A good example of God speaking by unspecified means is Judges 7:2-11 where God communicates with Gideon about the upcoming battle with Midian. Another example is I Samuel 23 where David “inquired of the Lord” whether he should go to battle against the Philistines and “the Lord answered him and said …” These examples are the norm rather than the exception.Thus, a straight forward reading of this biblical evidence makes it easy to believe that: (1) It is NORMAL for God to speak to his people on a REGULAR basis through personal encounters and private revelations and (2) Most of these encounters do not involve overtly supernatural means like an audible voice or the appearance of an angel but involve natural phenomenon like dreams or an inner voice.
With this biblical basis for believing that God still speaks today, I began to seek out credible examples of this supernatural and personal encounter with the living God.
A friend told me to visit Lookout Mountain Community Church. Within their church, they have a group of trained, lay ministers with prophetic gifts. These people will meet with you and pray for you and tell you things that God is revealing to them about you – things that God wants you to know about what he is doing in your life.
I met with three of these people one evening and it was very profound. They told me things about myself that God was revealing to them – things that were completely true about me and things they had no way of knowing since I was a total stranger to them. They were telling me these things within two minutes of meeting me and knowing nothing about me other than my first name. Furthermore, I’ve had friends that have had similar, credible experiences with these prophetically gifted people at LMCC.
The next step on this journey was getting reintroduced to Jack Deere. Jack was peripherally involved in my becoming a Christian in the 1970s. He was attending Dallas Seminary at the time and was widely recognized as a bright light and a rising star in Evangelical circles. Dallas Seminary was a stronghold of Cessationist thinking and Jack fit right in. When he graduated, he was asked to stay on as a professor and he did just that.
In the mid 1980s however, Jack began to have some encounters with overtly supernatural phenomenon. A man he greatly admired came to a church Jack was leading and conducted a healing service where people Jack knew were healed of chronic aliments. God gave revelations to people that resulted in the resolution of long-standing emotional wounds. Demonic activity became manifested and the demons were driven out. Despite his theology that said that such things no longer happened, Jack could not deny that they were happening right in the midst of his own church.
Over a two year period, Deere came to realize that his theology on this matter had been wrong. His change of theology led to his dismissal from Dallas Seminary. Jack wrote two books on his journey entitled Surprised by the Holy Spirit and Surprised by the Voice of God. They were enormously helpful to me for a number of reasons: (1) I knew Jack personally, (2) He had impeccable theological credentials, (3) He had been a skeptic of the overtly supernatural.
Two other authors have been very helpful. Dallas Willard’s book entitled Hearing God was insightful. And several books by John Eldredge have given me helpful guidance.
In coming posts on this blog, I’ll share some of the encounters that have come from this shift in my thinking on this matter.
But, for the moment, I’m very interested in your own stories. Has God spoken to you about the details and circumstances of your own life? Can you share them with us? Are you willing to be labeled as a schizophrenic?!
Monday, August 4, 2008
Obama, Oil and DWUI
Senator Barak Obama commented recently on Exxon-Mobile’s 2nd quarter profits of $12 billion by noting that, “No U. S. corporation ever made that much in a single quarter”. In a statement on his web site, the senator called these profits “outrageous ... while Americans are paying record prices at the pump.”
This kind of populist demagoguery against oil companies in particular and private enterprise in general may be effective in securing votes but it is intellectually dishonest and enormously harmful to our society.
Senator Obama is seeking to become the chief executive officer of a country that is asking its citizens to contribute $3 trillion over the next 12 months to keep it operating. Just as no corporation in history has made more profit than Exxon, we can truthfully observe that no country in history has ever expected its citizens to pay so much money to support a record high budget! Does the Senator find this as outrageous as Exxon-Mobile behavior? And, at a time when Americans are paying record amounts of money to keep the country operating, is Obama's call for higher taxes not equally outrageous?
Perhaps Senator Obama is unaware that the federal government that he seeks to lead will take in about $6.7 billion in gasoline taxes for the gas consumed by Americans during the 2nd quarter of this year? When state and local gas taxes are added to the federal burden, governments at all levels will rake in $16.1 billion in gas tax profits. Shouldn't the senator find this to be equally outrageous?
Obama is concerned about the record high gas prices being paid by Americans and he is advocating new taxes on oil company profits which he would return to private citizens through a tax rebate. If there is some moral obligation for oil companies to share their record high profits, should the federal government be subject to a similar obligation to share the windfall profit they are receiving from record high gas tax revenues?
In a related note, Obama suggested recently that we can save as much oil as we would get from drilling for more oil by just keeping our tires inflated and keeping our cars tuned up. This could be dismissed as one of those misstatements that anyone campaigning for public office is going to make from time to time but Obama has continued to defend his remark.
In a country where people find it difficult to maintain discipline with a diet or exercise routine for more than 27 nanoseconds, do we really believe that people will be diligent in keeping their tires inflated? We should, in fact, keep our tires properly inflated but this cannot be considered a serious public policy proposal.
Perhaps Obama will propose some legislation to penalize people who don’t comply. I can see it now. On those three-day holiday weekends, we’ll add tire inflation checkpoints to our sobriety checkpoints. A guy who is stone-cold sober may make it through the drunk driving check only to find that he is still cited for DWUI – Driving While Under Inflated. We’ll cuff him and haul him off to jail and take away his license and get him to perform community service for his failure to help the country out of this energy crisis.
This country can solve its energy problem and it can do it in short order with a few wise decisions. A commitment to more drilling here and now would make an immediate impact. I also like the proposal put forward by a coalition of national security experts and environmentalists that would involve converting automobiles to methanol over the next few years (See more here at http://www.setamericafree.org/ and specifically here at: http://www.setamericafree.org/blueprint.pdf ) . I’m also in favor of conservation.
This seems like an issue that is ready made for the bi-partisan approach that people claim to want. The one thing that will not work is the demonization of private industry that Senator Obama is utilizing in pandering for votes. Regrettably, Senator McCain is not much better. He too is running ads that tout his courage in taking on the big, bad oil companies.
As I have observed before, I'm much more afraid of a monopolistic government that can take money from me by force than I am of a private business that risks enormous amounts of capital and still has to compete for the chance to take money out of my pocket.
This kind of populist demagoguery against oil companies in particular and private enterprise in general may be effective in securing votes but it is intellectually dishonest and enormously harmful to our society.
Senator Obama is seeking to become the chief executive officer of a country that is asking its citizens to contribute $3 trillion over the next 12 months to keep it operating. Just as no corporation in history has made more profit than Exxon, we can truthfully observe that no country in history has ever expected its citizens to pay so much money to support a record high budget! Does the Senator find this as outrageous as Exxon-Mobile behavior? And, at a time when Americans are paying record amounts of money to keep the country operating, is Obama's call for higher taxes not equally outrageous?
Perhaps Senator Obama is unaware that the federal government that he seeks to lead will take in about $6.7 billion in gasoline taxes for the gas consumed by Americans during the 2nd quarter of this year? When state and local gas taxes are added to the federal burden, governments at all levels will rake in $16.1 billion in gas tax profits. Shouldn't the senator find this to be equally outrageous?
Obama is concerned about the record high gas prices being paid by Americans and he is advocating new taxes on oil company profits which he would return to private citizens through a tax rebate. If there is some moral obligation for oil companies to share their record high profits, should the federal government be subject to a similar obligation to share the windfall profit they are receiving from record high gas tax revenues?
In a related note, Obama suggested recently that we can save as much oil as we would get from drilling for more oil by just keeping our tires inflated and keeping our cars tuned up. This could be dismissed as one of those misstatements that anyone campaigning for public office is going to make from time to time but Obama has continued to defend his remark.
In a country where people find it difficult to maintain discipline with a diet or exercise routine for more than 27 nanoseconds, do we really believe that people will be diligent in keeping their tires inflated? We should, in fact, keep our tires properly inflated but this cannot be considered a serious public policy proposal.
Perhaps Obama will propose some legislation to penalize people who don’t comply. I can see it now. On those three-day holiday weekends, we’ll add tire inflation checkpoints to our sobriety checkpoints. A guy who is stone-cold sober may make it through the drunk driving check only to find that he is still cited for DWUI – Driving While Under Inflated. We’ll cuff him and haul him off to jail and take away his license and get him to perform community service for his failure to help the country out of this energy crisis.
This country can solve its energy problem and it can do it in short order with a few wise decisions. A commitment to more drilling here and now would make an immediate impact. I also like the proposal put forward by a coalition of national security experts and environmentalists that would involve converting automobiles to methanol over the next few years (See more here at http://www.setamericafree.org/ and specifically here at: http://www.setamericafree.org/blueprint.pdf ) . I’m also in favor of conservation.
This seems like an issue that is ready made for the bi-partisan approach that people claim to want. The one thing that will not work is the demonization of private industry that Senator Obama is utilizing in pandering for votes. Regrettably, Senator McCain is not much better. He too is running ads that tout his courage in taking on the big, bad oil companies.
As I have observed before, I'm much more afraid of a monopolistic government that can take money from me by force than I am of a private business that risks enormous amounts of capital and still has to compete for the chance to take money out of my pocket.
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