Monthly Archives: October 2017

"When Jesus saw him and knew that he had been lying there a long time, He said to him, "Do you want to be healed?" John 5:6

Are you familiar with the word bilious? The first time I heard it, I wasn't sure what it meant. Something to do with bile, I supposed. Later I learned from the dictionary that it means "relating to or containing bile," and "a sickly yellowish color" At least I had the bile part right.

The woman who used the word was an elderly lady in a former church who was describing for me the inadequacies of a color that had been used in her Sunday School classroom. I had gone to visit her during December. She was an eccentric widow, and I thought a visit might cheer her during a sensitive time of the year. Somehow the discussion swerved into paint color and with great theatrical flourish, she pronounced her disdain. "Bilious!" she said. "Absolutely bilious!" She used the word once more during my 15 minute visit. She was nothing if not focused.

I thought of her recently when reading John's account of Jesus' healing the crippled man beside the pool (5:2-18). For thirty-eight years he had been there, waiting for the miracle that never came. When Jesus found him, He asked a question that sounds very unusual. "Do you want to be healed?"

Why ask that question? Was He serious? Who wouldn't want to be healed? To have a chance to walk, to rid yourself of the calluses, the pressure sores, to begin to live a more normal life? Of course he wanted to be healed!

The question does sound ludicrous until you realize that the Gospel of John moves on two levels: physical and spiritual. Physical events signify spiritual realities. This is true of any of the gospels to some extent, but John makes it an overarching theme.

So much is this the case that John actually never uses the word "miracle" in his work. The Greek word for miracle is dunamis, from which we get the English word dynamite. In this understanding the mighty works of Jesus were power displays, which they certainly were, of course.

John wanted a different focus, however. Instead of the word miracle he used the word "sign." The miraculous event, and John recorded seven of these, were signs that pointed to a spiritual truth. The healing of the man by the pool is the third of the seven signs in John.

So why did Jesus asked the question, do you want to be healed? The word "healed" here has another level of meaning beyond simply physical restoration. In fact, in this story you find three different words for healing. Two of them refer to a physical healing. This word in verse 6, however, refers also to being whole.

So Jesus was not asking merely if the man wanted to be rid of his disease. He was asking if he wanted to be whole, complete, restored, balanced. "Do you want to be well?" See the difference?

What if Jesus asked you that question? Are you ready to be healed?

Many times we can become very comfortable with our infirmities, physical or spiritual. Instead of making the genuine effort to deal with the problem we prefer the attention that comes from having the problem. Or we fail to see a problem at all.

Take my friend with the affinity for the word bilious. She had developed over the years a reputation as a rather prickly person with a superior attitude. Consequently, she had few real friends and was rather awkward in most social settings, though she certainly would not have recognized this. In a kind of etymological karma, a fourth level meaning of the word bilious is "having a peevish disposition, ill-humor." That's genuine irony.

Imagine her reaction if I had said the following: "Mrs. Smith (obviously not her real name), you are creating a great many problems for yourself by looking down on other people and having a generally negative outlook on life. Faith gives you the opportunity to have real joy and a divine optimism. God has surrounded you with people who genuinely love you. If you looked at His blessings, instead of all the things that perturb you, then you might not be so fixated on paint color." She would probably have looked at me like I was an alien, with a bilious skin tone.

Do you want to be healed? We all need to hear and answer this question honestly. Before Jesus can deliver us from the real problems that beset us, we have to acknowledge their presence. True spiritual growth means honestly looking at the spiritual handicaps we use to keep God at bay. Frankly, it's far easier to accommodate, excuse, and defend our spiritual shortcomings than go through the painful process of saying, "God, I'm sick and I desperately need to be healed."

Personally, on a physical level I would love to be rid of my occasional sciatic nerve pain, the aches in my right knee, tinnitus in my left ear, and the irritating eye problems associated with aging. If God healed each one of those, would I be whole?

No. Not until I asked for His help in getting past my fears, resentments, anger, and self-pity. These are the spiritual obstacles that are so much more serious than any physical problem I've ever had. I need help each day with these. I turn to God and say, "I want to be whole" and He helps those spiritual challenges have a little less hold on me.

So if you are tired of dealing with the same spiritual problems in life, perhaps it's time to have a talk with Jesus. What is it that holds you back? What is your real problem? What sin regularly breaks you? Is it a habit of thought? Or doubt? Do you struggle with fear, anger, resentment, and self-pity? How about pride, guilt, shame, etc?

The Holy Spirit can illuminate the darkest corners of your life and will do so gently. God can show you what needs to be done. Listen as He asks the question, "do you want to be healed?"

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

October 22, 2017

"We love because He first loved us." 1 John 4:19

Let's think about God's love this week. Nothing could possibly be more important than the fact that God loves us. Nothing.

Think of the two options. If God doesn't love us then we are absolutely lost, facing an eternal and hopeless fate. An implacably angry God, or a even a distant, uncaring God sends a shiver through my soul.

But if God does love us, then the clouds of hopelessness part, a shining eternity dawns, and a smiling God walks with us. God's love infuses each day, and every moment, with divine optimism. We're not alone, and we are deeply loved by the Creator.

The Bible is quite clear about God's love for us. Whatever you believe about these ancient texts you have to at least admit they portray a caring God who loves His creation and especially the pinnacle of that creation: you. From Creation through the Cross and beyond the pages practically shout that God loves us.

But how do you know? It's a fair question, one I've been asked innumerable times. I get it. Every hardship in life seems to be an a priori argument against the love of God. If God loves us then why are so many bad things happening? Why do we suffer if God cares? Anyone who has given ten minutes of serious consideration to eternal matters has wondered. How do we know God love us?

I have a story that proves to me beyond a shadow of doubt that God loves me.

A couple of months ago I conducted a wedding in Alabama. The bride is a friend of Lauren's, my daughter, so she had been asked to be in the ceremony. My granddaughter Emily Grace also went, for girls tend to love these flowery affairs, and the bride is actually Emily Grace's godmother. So there's the lineup.

Lauren, Emily Grace and I drove over on a Friday, and had the rehearsal for the joyous affair the next day. As my daughter was a bridesmaid, this meant an all-day commitment on Saturday to getting hair and make-up and dresses and pictures, etc.

An aside here. Men have such an advantage when it comes to weddings, one for which I am deeply grateful. We rent a tux, have someone show us how to wear a cummerbund and put on cuff links an hour before, and basically just do what we're told during the service. Very little thinking goes into a wedding for the men, which is usually a very good thing for the women.

Back to the story.

The last thing a 4 ½ year old needs to do for an entire Saturday before a wedding is be in the middle of a gaggle of young women who have been aggressively dieting for at least a month prior to the nuptials, and may have even gone through something akin to the weight-cut Conor McGregor endured prior to his last match. Again, if you need 6-8 hours to get ready for an event you're likely to be just a tad anxious about your appearance, tending perhaps to compare yourself unfavorably to others, and likely to be impatient with the constant flow of questions from a naturally inquisitive little girl. I humbly suggest the slimmest possibility of just a wee bit of crankiness that could be magnified by said little girl.

My solution was to have Emily Grace with me for much of the day. We were staying at a country club so we walked around and watched the men play golf for a little while. A playground was ours alone and she climbed her first "rock wall," slid down the slide, swung in the swings. We threw sticks and pine cones in the lake and ran up a hill until we fell down laughing. We went back to our room and watched cartoons.

After the wedding we made a brief appearance at the reception, then while her mom and dad stayed to visit and enjoy the entertainment we went back to the room. I bathed her, dried her golden hair, and dressed her for bed that she would not sleep in for several hours (she's not the best sleeper!). I told her a story or two, then put a movie on for her as I began to read. Laying there side-by-side, the day grew quiet and still. I began to snooze. She was still going strong, though quiet.

Then through the dreamy swirls of my early rest I heard her say "I love you Gandy." That was it. That was all. She didn't break from her movie. We had not been talking. She was just thinking about her day and a drowsy granddaddy beside her, and life was good.

And I knew at that very moment God loves me.

Many of the most tender "love verses" and "love stories" in the New Testament come from John's pen, particularly in his first letter. We think that John was an older man when he wrote this letter, and I like to think that in the warm embers of his life, after the fires of zeal had cooled a bit, John had a very clear vision of what God is. He wrote "God is love" twice. He wrote about what God's love compels us to do and to feel. It casts out fear, creates confidence, enables our joy.

Then he wrote "We love because He first loved us" (4:19). That's important. All "loves" are a reflection of the original, singular love of God. Each love is a reminder of God's very nature. So when we feel loved, in any of its limitless expressions, we are feeling God's love. God's love is not a theory, or an idea in a vacuum. Somehow it has to become concrete.

Emily Grace's love for her Gandy was an open window to heaven, a lens through which I was reminded of a smiling God who loves us both and took joy in the day we shared together. For that moment she was the incarnation. She loves because God loves. I felt God's love through her love.

I want you to pause and remember a time when you felt loved. There were no doubts. All of life distilled to that moment when you felt loved, and life was good and right. I don't care how long ago it was, that feeling is something God wants you to cling to. He loves you.

We don't always feel this way, of course. Life gets too noisy sometimes. But remember. That moment when you felt loved was God's touch, His assurance. You are deeply, eternally, joyfully loved.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

October 15, 2017

"When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another 'what is it?'" Exodus 16:15

Leslie recently said to me, "I was hoping by this age to have a few more things settled." It reminded me of a similar line from an elderly lady who said she thought that life would become clearer and even easier as she aged. "It hasn't," she said, "and I'm soooo disappointed!"

When we're children we're sure that by the time we're the age of an older sibling, or cousin, or whatever, that everything will be so much easier. I can recall a few such times in my life. When I was 6, to be able to stay up late seemed like the greatest thing I could hope for. When I was 11, looking ahead to changing classrooms every hour promised relief from the tedium of sitting in the same room all day. At age 15, I looked forward to driving. And girls. Both, I suppose, provided thrills but a great deal of extra expense.

I think the elderly lady and Leslie (who is no doubt much younger and much more thrilling) are giving voice to the same yearning. We all sense that things will be better in the future, and when they're not we're soooo disappointed!

The fact of the matter is that each chapter of life comes with its share of unanticipated trouble. Reach one milestone and you find that there's simply another mile to be walked. Perhaps the single clearest and most overlooked of Jesus' sayings is "let the days trouble be sufficient for the day." Not only was He teaching us not to worry about the future, He was also reminding us of the uncomfortable truth that each day has trouble.

Surely what I've described applies to the people of Israel after they left Egypt. What could possibly be better than freedom? Generations had lived and died in slavery. I doubt it was possible to even imagine change when the lash had driven them for hundreds of years.

Yet God showed up. Through Moses He set His people free. With whatever they could carry they headed east into the sunrise of hope. Did this solve all of their problems? Of course not. Each new chapter simply provides new pages for the same old messiness of life. The exact expression changes, but the underlying cause is always there.

We recall how God rescued them. The plagues opened the door. The parting of the sea closed it behind them. Guidance to clean water satisfied their thirst. Powerful miracles! Yet the trouble kept cropping up. They were running out of food.

And that brings us to the manna. Remember the details? The word manna literally means "what is it?" The hungry people came out of their tents one morning, found a flaky white substance covering the ground, and said (in Hebrew) man hu? Literally, "what is it?" Moses replied that it was breakfast, and lunch, and supper. It was the bread God had provided for them.

As people are wont to do they've tried to figure out for millennia "what it is" was. I'm not interested in that. The most intriguing thing about "what it is" is that God provided it daily and you could only collect enough for the day's meals, about an omer per person we're told. What is an omer, you ask? It's a tenth of a ephah, of course. All right, I'm teasing. It's about 2 quarts.

AND you could not collect more than two quarts per person per day. I absolutely would have tried that. I like to plan ahead, save for a rainy day, plan for the worst, etc. That strategy is good in saving for retirement, for example, but I've learned that as a broad rule it doesn't deepen my faith in God. It only magnifies my illusion of control. Trouble always finds a way to irrupt, even when I think I've covered all the bases. People in particular, and life in general, have an irritating habit of not cooperating with my plans.

To foil all the long-term planners like me, God created manna with a built-in expiration date of one day (except for what you collected on Friday morning which lasted two days). All the forward thinking Israelites discovered that yesterday's manna dramatically spoiled overnight. It bred worms and smelled foul. If you're like me, I know exactly what you're thinking: "Tupperware!" It would not have mattered. God didn't want them storing up.

Why? If they had enough to last a week, they would not have relied on God each day. He said He would provide, and He forced them to trust. And for forty years God was more reliable than Tupperware or even refrigeration.

My two greatest vertical questions are "Am I alone?" and "Does anyone care?" I'm not talking about family or society. Those are horizontal and pretty clearly answered. I'm talking about the eternal questions, the ones I ask the quiet night sky, the 2:00 am questions when the world, and the world in my head, gets quiet enough for me to hear them.

Manna answers both of them. The Bible is God's answer, repeatedly in different stories, across history, cultures, and languages. God is consistently saying, "Terry, I'm with you, and I will provide for you."

Whatever you think about the Bible or religion or spirituality in general, you really can't dispute that these are the answers we find to the important questions we ask. God is with you and He does provide for you.

"One day at a time" is one of those sayings that can get irritating to people that claim to want real and deep answers. But the reason "one day at a time" has such staying power is that it sums up a powerful truth. We live one day at a time whether we want to or not. We can drag the past after us if we choose. Or we can run after the mist that is tomorrow. But we're going to do it one day at a time.

Life does get easier, more settled, and clearer when we decide to live with trust in God. We don't need manna any more. We have plenty of food. And Tupperware. We do need a God who can take care of us. We do need a God who is trustworthy. And we have that kind of God. He simply does not disappoint us.

So we rise each day with a prayer that says "I don't know what today will bring, but God's got it." He does. Trust.

Grace,

Dr. Terry Ellis

October 1, 2017