|
GOOD FENCES MAKE BAD CHRISTIANS
#2
A BRIDGE OF BLOOD
Deep down, are there ever people you dislike because
of their skin color? Or their lack of ambition, their lazy welfare-chiseling?
Maybe simply the fact that they’re a lousy co-worker? The Bible doesn’t
tell us that it’s EASY to reconcile; it simply says that we have to.
We have a book here in the office where the author
makes a very stark admission.
“I grew up a racist,” he writes. “We used to call Martin Luther King Jr.
‘Martin Lucifer Coon.’ . . . Although I am not yet 50 years old, I remember
well when the South practiced a perfectly legal form of apartheid. Stores
in downtown Atlanta had three restrooms: White Men, White Women, and Colored.
Gas stations had two drinking fountains, one for Whites and one for Colored.
Motels and restaurants served white patrons only, and when the Civil Rights
Act made such discrimination illegal, many owners shuttered their establishments.”
He goes on to tell how his church used to meet black
worshipers at the entrance with a preprinted card, asking that they leave.
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, his church started up a private
academy — white kids only — that got around the ruling.
“A year later,” the same writer confesses, “the church
board rejected a Carver Bible Institute student for membership (his name
was Tony Evans and he went on to become a prominent pastor and speaker.)”
Well, friend, we’ve quoted that Tony Evans on this
radio program many, many times. In fact, he’s probably tied for frequency
with the author of this book: none other than the gifted evangelical writer,
Philip Yancey. All of this was from his own semi-autobiography, entitled
What’s So Amazing About Grace?
And the reason why we go to this particular source — obviously Yancey
is a man who has experienced a stunning turnaround — is just this. We’re
studying here in Ephesians chapter two, and Paul has just been writing
in verses 11, 12 about how the world is so divided. Jews and Gentiles.
The chosen and the UN-chosen. Good and bad. And yes, all too tragically,
Sunday and Sabbath mornings have been “the most segregated hour in America,”
as black and white Christians have refused to sit next to each other in
a church pew. But this takes us now to verse 13:
“But NOW,” Paul writes, “in Christ Jesus you who once
were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”
And the rest of this chapter goes on to describe how
this has to happen: two worlds becoming one. Two groups blending into
one. Two universes merging into one. “Reconciled through the cross,” he
writes, further down in verse 16.
We’ve been taking some generous intellectual bites out of two great Bible
commentaries we have stacked up here at the office. And the Adventist
collection makes this observation about the power of verse 13:
“We are RECONCILED by His blood,” they write, “REDEEMED
by His blood, JUSTIFIED by His blood, and CLEANSED by His blood. The blood
of Christ is the vindication of God’s good name” — very true if you stop
and think about it, remembering that God Himself sent His own Son on this
mission of rescue — “and the proof OF His love.”
Even if believers don’t fully understand the spiritual
science of how the blood of Jesus redeems, justifies, and cleanses us,
I think most of us accept those three on faith. It’s true because the
Word says it is true. But this fourth one often stymies us: “We are reconciled
by His blood.” “Those of us who were once far away [from each other] have
been brought near . . . THROUGH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST.”
It’s painfully true that all through history, people with crosses on their
lapels and Bibles in their hands have failed to reconcile. The blood was
shed for them right there at the cross — and yet many of those same people
have gone out and burned crosses on somebody else’s lawn. Why? What has
gone wrong? How does the cross bring reconciliation?
Well, let me share two anecdotes — and the life of Philip Yancey himself
is Exhibit A. “I grew up a racist,” he says. “That’s what I was.” As a
child, as a teenager, as a hate-filled young man, he despised people of
other backgrounds. He spouted the same racist poison as his peers. Today,
several decades later, as he has faithfully studied the Christian message,
he has shed those views. Has it been hard? I have no doubt it has. Has
he sometimes had to choke back epithets, bathe his mind in Scripture texts
because certain stereotypes still linger? I’m sure that is a daily challenge.
But Philip Yancey, as he has written, and prayed, and immersed himself
in the Christian gospel of grace, has slowly come to realize that true
Christianity MUST go with reconciliation. It does, because it has to.
He passes along, in his chapter ten, “The Arsenal of Grace,” a story told
by Walter Wink. Two peacemakers, he writes, went over to Poland after
World War II to try and bring some reconciliation. This was ten years
after, actually, so the Christian arbitrators were quite hopeful when
they asked the Polish Christians: “Would you be willing to meet with other
Christians from West Germany?” They explained that the believers in Germany
wanted to apologize and repent for what they had done to Poland during
the war. “They want to build a new relationship,” they added.
Well, there was just no way. The Poles spoke up immediately. No way, not
a chance! “What you are asking is nie-moz’-li-wy — impossible,” asserted
one. “Each stone of Warsaw is soaked in Polish blood! We cannot forgive!”
Have you ever felt that way: that forgiveness for that certain person
is impossible? I have — many times. There’s no chance. How can it happen?
I can’t stop the pounding in my heart. All the Lord’s Prayers in the world
won’t change that.
Well, speaking of the Lord’s Prayer, after a very unsatisfactory and unproductive
meeting, the Christians from Poland and the two peacemakers were ready
to say goodbye. And, as is often the tradition, they gathered in a circle
and began to say the Lord’s Prayer. And all at once, when they got to
the part, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive . . .” they stopped. How
could you say, “No way, we can’t forgive,” and then blithely say this
prayer? You can’t do it. And here’s how Walter Wink finishes the story:
“Everyone stopped praying. Tension swelled in the room.”
And now get this: “The Pole who had spoken so vehemently said, ‘I must
say yes to you. I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer
call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot
do it, but God will give me His strength!’” And Yancey adds: “Eighteen
months later the Polish and West German Christians met together in Vienna,
establishing friendships that continue to this day.”
In other words, the blood of Christ brings reconciliation
partly because it COMMANDS reconciliation. The “Our Father” demands it.
The gospel of grace demands it. The parables of Jesus, which teach “Forgive
as ye are forgiven,” demand it.
But there’s more to it than that. Because when we see the magnitude of
the love of God, expressed through Calvary, we slowly but surely begin
to comprehend the smallness of our petty quarrels down here below. As
the cross looms large, our trivial hatreds melt away. Only if we’re LOOKING
at the cross, of course. But all through the history of the Christian
Church, believers who have truly understood the gospel message have had
Ephesians chapter two come to life for them. It has become real.
Go back for a minute to that Bible commentary statement: “The blood of
Christ is the vindication of God’s good name.” How true it is, friend
— for good or for ill — that our willingness to be one in Christ is equally
a vindication of God’s name. OR . . . a besmirching of it if we fail to
forgive and unite at Calvary. True?
Let me close by taking you back to the year 1776 — which is a year some
blood was shed here in the United States of America. But over in England,
a young Christian named Augustus Toplady was in attendance at a meeting
where a workingman was preaching a simple message on this text right here:
Ephesians 2:13.
“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away
have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”
And that plain gospel message — so the story goes,
it actually happened in a barn — broke through to Toplady’s heart. He
became a Christian that night, convinced that the blood of Jesus had the
power to save and also to reconcile.
Later, now a minister, he was hiking through the “rugged country of .
. . Cheddar Gorge,” according to a Christian History Institute web site.
“The clouds burst and torrential sheets of rain pummeled
the earth. The weary traveler,” writes the anonymous author, “was able
to find shelter standing under a rocky overhang. There, protected from
the buffeting wind and rain, Augustus Toplady conceived one of the most
popular hymns ever written, ‘Rock of Ages, Cleft for me, Let me hide myself
inThee.’”
And he writes about the blood right here in verse one:
“Let the water and the blood, From Thy riven side which
flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power.”
Yes, friend, the blood of Jesus – the POWER of the
blood of Jesus – is more than a match for the power of racism, and division,
and hatred. Every time, if we’ll only let it.
Two years later, by the way, at the age of 38, this gifted new Christian
died of consumption.
“When I soar to worlds unknown, And behold Thee on
Thy throne, Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee.”
|
