Encounters With Jesus

Something gets in the way of our hearing what Jesus is talking about, and I think it’s that most of us aren’t able to recognize our soul thirst for what it is. As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as “drive” and your anxiety as “hope.” And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is. Most of us tell ourselves that the reason we remain unfulfilled is because we simply haven’t been able to achieve our goals. And so we can live almost our entire lives without admitting to ourselves the depth of our spiritual thirst.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god … to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

God always works through the men or the boys nobody wanted, through the women or girls nobody wanted.

therefore, if you’re skeptical about Christianity, I would like you to realize that you have a balance to strike. First, to remain skeptical forever is intellectually and morally self-defeating. On the other hand, surrendering to the first idea that you hope will solve your deep emotional needs will not answer any questions for you in the end. It’s not enough to turn to Christianity simply because it meets some perceived needs. Christianity is not a consumer good. You should turn to it only if it is true.

we often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams. And when that happens, it’s easy to walk past Jesus.

The founders of every other major religion said, “I’m a prophet who shows you how to find God,” but Jesus taught, “I’m God, come to find you.”

That’s Dostoyevsky’s Christianity surging through his literary imagination and craft. He says that he believes that at the end the reality will be so astonishing, the joy will be so incredible, the fulfillment will be so amazing that the most miserable life will feel (as St. Teresa of Ávila was reputed to have said) “like one night in a bad hotel.”

At the end of the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling has a puppet of the Dark Lord Voldemort say, “Lord Voldemort showed me … there is no good and evil, there is only power.” I think Rowling is saying there may be few things more evil than denying that there’s evil. That’s what Satan wants.

Christianity says there’s more evil than you can account for in the world just from the cumulative effect of wrong individual choices. And you can attribute some of that evil to actual demonic forces.

And when Jesus was in such moments, out came the words of the Bible. Something like 10 percent of all the things he says in the Bible are quotations of, or allusions to, the Hebrew Scriptures. When you know Scripture that well, you process all thoughts and feelings through a grid of biblical revelation. And when you have God’s own assurances, summonses, promises, and revelations secured that deep inside you, it’s extremely difficult for Satan to get a foothold and block your assurance of your salvation. You aren’t vulnerable along the front where he can best attack you.

The best way for you to get an acquittal for your legal client is not to hope you can get some sympathy from the court. The best way is to show that your client must be acquitted under the law. You want to be able to say with integrity and conviction, “This is the law, and the law demands my client’s acquittal.” You want to make a case that is not based on how the court feels at the time but is open and shut according to the law. And Jesus has one! Jesus Christ can say, in effect, “Father, my people have sinned, and the law demands that the wages of sin be death. But I have paid for those sins. See, here is my blood, the token of my death! On the cross I have paid the penalty for these sins completely. Now, if anyone were to exact two payments for the same sin, it would be unjust. And so—I am not asking for mercy for them; I’m asking for justice.” That, if Jesus’ claims are true, is an infallible case. This is why John could say that when Christians confess their sins they are forgiven because the justice of God now demands it!

The first Advocate is speaking to God for you, but the second Advocate is speaking to you for you. Throughout the Farewell Discourse, Jesus keeps saying that the job of the Spirit is to take all the things Jesus has done on our behalf—all the things that the apostles had still not yet grasped—and to “teach you” and “remind you” and enable the apostles to finally understand all that Jesus had taught them about his saving work (John 14:26). Theologian J. I. Packer has taught that the Holy Spirit’s ministry is much like that of a floodlight. If you walk by a building at night and it’s floodlit, you say, “Look at that beautiful building.” You may not even see where the light is coming from. The floodlight’s job is not to show you itself but to show you the beauty of the building, to throw all of its features into relief.

This week, somebody criticized you. Something you bought or invested in turned out to be less valuable than you thought. Something you wanted to happen didn’t go the way you wanted it to. Someone you counted on let you down. These are real losses—of your reputation, of your material wealth, of your hopes. But what are you going to do, if you’re a Christian? Will this setback disrupt your contentment with life? Will you shake your fist at God? Toss and turn at night? If so, I submit that it’s because you don’t know how truly rich you are. You are not listening to the second Advocate about your first Advocate. You are not living in joy. You are forgetting that the only eyes in the universe that matter see you not as the “phony little fake” you have sometimes been, but as a person of captivating beauty. If you’re that upset about your status with other people, if you’re constantly lashing out at people for hurting your feelings, you might call it a lack of self-control or a lack of self-esteem, and it is. But more fundamentally, you have totally lost touch with your identity. As a Christian, you’re a spiritual billionaire and you’re wringing your hands over ten dollars.

It’s the job of the second Advocate to argue with you in the court of your heart, to make the case about who you are in Christ, to show you that you’re rich. And it’s your job to listen.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all mention “the cup” as the heart of Jesus’ prayer that night. The cup, in ancient times, was like the electric chair. Remember how Socrates was executed—he drank a cup of poison. “The cup” did not represent just any kind of death in general but rather a judicial death in particular. The apostles’ use of the term means that Jesus knows he is going to be executed. But it means even more than that.

The judicial wrath of God is about to come down upon him rather than upon us. And while this outpouring of wrath struck with full force on the cross the next day—where Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—I agree with the commentators who believe that he was beginning to get his first experiential foretaste of it here in the garden. What would that judicial wrath feel like? It is the torture of divine absence.

The judgment of God in the Bible is unbelievably fair. It is an utterly natural consequence. The essence of sin is “I do not want to have God in my life.” And the essence of God’s judicial wrath is to give us what we have asked for. There truly is nothing fairer than that—and nothing more terrible.

As C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, if in this life you never say to God, “Thy will be done,” then eventually God will say to you for the afterlife, “All right, then thy will be done.” If you want freedom from God, you will quite justly get what you hope for. And it will be torment.

“Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” (Matthew 26:40). Here is a man under the most crushing weight asking his friends for a little support and finding that they have gone to sleep on him. He has been completely let down, but what does he say? Matthew records Jesus’ words: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). Isn’t that remarkable? He is giving them some credit. He says, “You let me down, but I know you mean well.” In the depths of his agony he can still find something affirming to say to his friends. There are about twenty things wrong with the disciples’ performance that night, but he finds the one or two things that are right and points them out.

To put it simply, Jesus is directing a cosmic transition plan—one that will bring about new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17–25). As ascended Lord he is spreading the gospel and building up his church by working in the hearts of people while he guides all the events of history toward a glorious end.

I once heard a Bible teacher put it like this—“When it comes to following Jesus, the hardest thing to give is in.”

So the fourth thing you need is community. Mary does not appear to understand what is going on until she goes to see another believing sister, and they talk together and worship together. Yes, like Mary you need to think intensely and doubt openly, and eventually surrender completely—but it won’t be enough to simply do that as a solitary individual, without trusted friends around you. Some of us don’t want people to know we are even having spiritual struggles until after we have gone through them and we can tell people about them in the past tense: “That was a dark time.” But in the end, you are never going to make it without community.