We talk a lot about the Ragtown experience. I was thinking this morning about what that really is. At least, this is what I hope it is for everyone who walks through our doors. It is two hours of what it feels like to experience an authentic relationship with Jesus.
You can hear a lot of promises being made in the name of Jesus these days. Promises of restored health, accumulated wealth, and and total control of your circumstances. You can go from channel to channel and station to station and hear whatever someone thinks you want to hear. Bookstore shelves are filled with things some writer thinks you will buy. Things that tickle our ears. And they all piece together Scripture to support it.
I get that people want to hear that. Who wouldn’t? But reality is, in this world you are going to have tribulation. What I need is something authentic that I can cling to when all of those promises evaporate. Something greater than my ability to gin up some victorious thinking or manage my own behavior. We live in a lost and broken world. People are hurting. People are hurting us. Read the paper…it doesn’t look like Jesus is winning.
For the past sixteen years I have been writing plays about the apostles of Jesus and that firstborn generation of Children of the Resurrection. I have lived with them for weeks on end, attempting to get to know them well enough to depict them in words on paper. The apostles…those common working class men received the Holy Spirit accompanied by astounding displays of God’s power…tongues of fire and the sudden miraculous ability to share the Gospel with people of every nation, offering the promise of salvation in languages they did not know. People were instantly healed when one of the apostles touched them.
And yet, almost to a man, those apostles were persecuted, stoned, whipped, and martyred in hideous ways. And perhaps worse, they endured watching those precious ones, who had come to faith in Jesus on the strength of their teaching, suffering those same agonies. How could that have looked like Jesus was winning? And yet they remained unshaken in their faith in Him. Unshaken.
The tenacity of the Jewish heart. Thank God that He made them that way…for us.
The apostles and those first believers had an authentic relationship with Jesus. They believed in Him in spite of what they saw happening to them in the terrible ordeal of their tribulation. They were not counting on physical or material blessings in this world as evidence. Their eyes and their trust remained fixed upon Jesus, and His promise of a blessing beyond, which would be of such surpassing glory that it would eclipse whatever pain and suffering they were enduring…and whatever good fortune they might have enjoyed.
With their eyes on Jesus, absolutely tenacious in their faith in Him, they walked in that victory, regardless of their present temporal circumstances. They were raised and seated with Him already, and knew it.
Jesus is real and we can trust Him. He isn’t winning. He won. That is the simple core of an authentic relationship with Him, and I hope that Truth is the core of the Ragtown experience. I believe that is the assurance, which we all receive from each other when we gather there. We need to hold fast to it.
Recent Comments