Monthly Archives: February 2012

Seeing Jesus

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When I was in fourth grade, my Sunday school teacher announced a contest to memorize the 23rd Psalm. The prize was an 8-by-10-inch portrait of Jesus in a beautiful gold frame. I memorized the psalm, won the contest, and proudly hung the painting on my bedroom wall. In this iconic painting, Warner Sallman portrayed Jesus as a bearded man with long wavy hair, gazing up to heaven. He looked meek and mild to me—a tame Jesus who asks little and gives little.

That painting wasn’t the only image of Jesus in our house. The other portrait, a print of Richard Hook’s Head of Christ, was much larger and showed Jesus looking you straight in the eye. He has shorter, unkempt hair and a short beard. He looks ready and able to drive out the moneychangers and cast out demons. That portrait of a radical, powerful Jesus presided over my Dad’s workshop in the garage.

How do you see Jesus? Do you see him as a wimp who has no relevance today? Or do you see him as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the creator of the universe, a real man embodying a real God? The answer to that question determines whether you can rely on Jesus when you feel worried or afraid. Only the latter Jesus has the power to change your mind and heart, to cast out the demon of worry and fill you with his peace.

 

Warning Signals

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BEEP. The piercing, high-pitched sound penetrated my consciousness. The battery in the smoke alarm must be dying, I thought, as I rolled over and drifted back to sleep. BEEP. There it was again. I didn’t want to get out of bed to check the battery. Instead I lay there, half awake, dreading the next BEEP.

Worry, like that intermittent beeping, is a signal that all is not well. Too often we tolerate it, just as I tolerated the beeping. It’s better to pay attention. Start by asking yourself, “Can I take some action to solve this problem?” Perhaps you need to make an appointment to see the doctor about the lump you found or call the dentist about the tooth that’s hurting. Perhaps you need to make a phone call to ask why your son or daughter hasn’t come home yet.

If you can’t identify an action that will solve the problem, then worry may be a signal that all is not well on a deeper level. It calls you to examine your life, to look below the surface, to seek out the source of your worry. As Francis Chan writes in his book, Crazy Love, “Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.”

So take a few moments. Consider what you usually worry about. Ask God for insight regarding the underlying cause. Then ask him to direct you to a solution. Don’t hang back, because Scripture says, “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you” (1 Peter 5:7, NLT).

In case you’re wondering, the beeping eventually woke my husband. He got up and removed the batteries from both smoke alarms before finding the problem:  the carbon monoxide detector. Once those batteries were replaced, we were both able to get some sleep.

Don’t let worry interrupt your sleep. Track down its source, take action when possible, and trust God with the rest.

Prayer Works

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God amazes me with his answers to prayer. Let me share one example. My mother lives in a nursing home in Albuquerque, far from my sisters and me. She has macular degeneration and has been legally blind for seven or eight years. Recently her vision deteriorated further and she lost the ability to read large print books. She was very discouraged, especially because she couldn’t read her Bible.

About that time, my mom’s roommate died. I prayed for her next roommate to be a good fit. A few days later her new roommate, Donna, answered the phone when I called. She told me she’d served as a missionary in Indonesia and had read to blind people. I asked if she would read to my mother. She said they had already talked about that. I had prayed for a kind roommate and God provided someone who can read to my mom. No wonder the apostle Paul describes God as the one “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…” (Ephesians 3:20).

God’s astonishing power and his gracious answers to prayer encourage me to pray instead of worrying. My mom’s new roommate is only one answer to recent prayers. Some answers have come almost immediately—a friend’s daughter who was facing a 90-day residential treatment program for substance abuse issues improved the day my small group prayed for her, so she can be treated as an outpatient. Other answers have taken longer, teaching me to persevere in prayer.

I’ve started praying about issues at work also. For example, I helped coworkers develop a complex database. At one point we hit a brick wall. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get certain fields in the data entry form to automatically fill. Our frustration level skyrocketed. On the way home I prayed about the problem. A day or two later I woke up in the middle of the night with the phrase “auto-fill” in my mind. I wrote the phrase down, did a Google search the next morning and found detailed instructions with a worked example. Those were sufficient to show us how to redesign the tables and their relationships and produce a query that worked. This sort of thing has happened so often lately that both my supervisor and I recognize that Romans 8:28 is true: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him….”

Knowing that God can solve problems I can’t has set me free from much worry. Paul’s words to the early Christians at Philippi are spot on: “Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life” (Philippians 4:6-7, The Message).

As Christ becomes the center of my life, my natural pessimism is giving way to a brimming optimism. God truly can accomplish far more than anything I can ask or imagine.