GOD'S PROMISES ROLLED IN LIKE SETS OF WAVES

Once in a while I come across a magazine article or a book that greatly challenges my comfortable level of Christian living and thought. A few days ago I had one of those Holy Spirit encounters. 

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a leftist, lesbian university professor who despised Christians — and then somehow she became one.

She begins her story with the following statement: “The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn’t hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that ‘knowing Jesus’ meant knowing little else.”

Rosaria was a professor of English and women’s studies and on the track to becoming, in her words, “a tenured radical” who cared about morality, justice and compassion. In her testimony, Rosaria talks about how she could probably have found a way to stomach the message of Jesus had it not been for, again as she saw it, the co-mingling of the Christian dogma with Republican politics.

After Rosaria was tenured, she began researching the Religious Right and their politics of “hatred toward queers like me.” While doing her research, she felt that she had to read the one book that had “gotten so many people off track” — the Bible.

Rosaria writes: “I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering that my partner and I were hosting, my transgendered friend J cornered me in the kitchen. ‘This Bible reading is changing you,’ she warned.

“I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. . . . I fought with everything I had. I did not want this. I did not ask for this . . . but God’s promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world.

“Then one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked . . . and I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, He could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me ‘wife’ and many call me ‘mother.’”

(Rosaria is now the wife of a pastor in North Carolina and the mother of several children.)

The link to the full article is:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/my-train-wreck-conversion.html

I am greatly challenged by the impact that God’s Word had on this precious soul even in the depths of her wayward lifestyle. I am also challenged by the neglect of the Word that is currently in vogue in the contemporary church where target marketing, the principles of John Maxwell, and the well-thought-out programs of Rick Warren are often more revered than the teachings of God’s Word. Is it any wonder that Christianity is in decline in America?

“The rain and snow come down from the heavens
and stay on the ground to water the earth.
They cause the grain to grow,
producing seed for the farmer
and bread for the hungry.
 It is the same with my word.
I send it out, and it always produces fruit.
It will accomplish all I want it to,
and it will prosper everywhere I send it” (Isaiah 55:10-11, NLT).

I’ll give you one more brief story about the impact of the Word of God and then I’ll leave you to mull this on your own.

Many years ago Robert Burris served as a missionary in the south of China. A part of his ministry was to distribute copies of the Bible in Chinese. Mr. Burris and three companions were on a trip with 4000 copies of the Chinese New Testament to give away and in the first ten days, about one-half of the New Testaments were given out. In a remote area they were stopped by armed bandits who took their money, their luggage, and the remaining 2000 copies of the New Testament.

Nearly twenty-five years later, Robert Burris was pastoring a church in Ohio and he and his wife attended a missions service at a church in a nearby town. The speaker at the service was a missionary to south China, and as a part of his presentation he showed slides of his work and area of service. Among these slides was a picture of the exact area where Burris and his companions had been robbed.

“Now,” the missionary said, “we come to the most important slide in my collection. It is a picture of what I call The Miracle Church.” The picture on the screen showed a large building.

“This is The Miracle Church because no one knows how it got started. Every Sunday four hundred people attend and each one has a copy of the New Testament. No one knows where they got these New Testaments and as far as it is known, no missionary ever went into these mountains because of the bandits. Yet today the church is there and the people have God’s Word.”

Robert Burris and his wife sat and smiled and wept in gratitude. God’s Word that had been taken from him twenty-five years earlier had been busy building the church in China.

“I send it out, and it always produces fruit” (Isaiah 55:11).

And it will in us, too, if we let the promises of God roll in!