Table Of ContentGrace Notes: April Free Preview
Philip Yancey
Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
April
APRIL 1 Grace-Starved
APRIL 2 Absentee Landlord
APRIL 3 Free Partners
APRIL 4 Unanswered Prayer
APRIL 5 Prayers from the Heart
APRIL 6 Touching the Void
APRIL 7 Scent of Scandal
APRIL 8 Servant in Chief
APRIL 9 A Time to Laugh
APRIL 10 In Search of a Both/And Church
APRIL 11 Hope from a Jewish Extremist
APRIL 12 A Healthy Start
APRIL 13 God’s Face
APRIL 14 The Wager
APRIL 15 Out of Time
APRIL 16 Tragic Lessons
APRIL 17 Keeping Faith
APRIL 18 Better
APRIL 19 Weight of a Nation
APRIL 20 Jolt of Tragedy
APRIL 21 Happy Ending
APRIL 22 New Moon in the Moral Universe
APRIL 23 The Flame of Ideals
APRIL 24 An Unhappy Life
APRIL 25 Staggering on the Path
APRIL 26 Truth Minus Grace
APRIL 27 Second Chance
APRIL 28 Two Spiritual Guides
APRIL 29 Grace for All
APRIL 30 Safety Net
Copyright
About the Publisher
Share Your Thoughts
April
APRIL 1
Grace-Starved
I
saw in Russia in 1991 a people starved for grace. The economy, indeed the
entire society, was in a state of free fall, and everyone had someone to blame. I
noted that ordinary Russian citizens had the demeanor of battered children:
lowered heads, halting speech, eyes darting this way and that. Whom could they
trust?
I will never forget a meeting in which Moscow journalists wept—I had
never before seen journalists weep—as Ron Nikkel of Prison Fellowship
International told of the underground churches that were now thriving in
Russia’s penal colonies. For seventy years prisons had been the repository of
truth, the one place where you could safely speak the name of God. It was in
prison, not church, that people such as Solzhenitsyn found God.
Ron Nikkel also told me of his conversation with a general who headed the
Ministry of Internal Affairs. The general had heard of the Bible from the old
believers and had admired it, but as a museum piece, not something to be
believed. Recent events, though, had made him reconsider. In late 1991 when
Boris Yeltsin ordered the closing of all national, regional, and local Communist
Party offices, his ministry policed the dismantling. “Not one party official,” said
the general, “not one person directly affected by the closings protested.” He
contrasted that to the seventy-year campaign to destroy the church and stamp out
belief in God. “The Christians’ faith outlasted any ideology. The church is now
resurging in a way unlike anything I have witnessed.”
In 1983 a group of Youth With A Mission daredevils unfolded a banner on
Easter Sunday morning in Red Square: “Christ is Risen!” it read in Russian.
Some older Russians fell to their knees and wept. Soldiers soon surrounded the
hymn-singing troublemakers, tore up their banner, and hustled them off to jail.
Less than a decade later, all over Red Square on Easter Sunday people were
greeting each other in the traditional way, “Christ is risen!”…“He is risen
indeed!”
What’s So Amazing About Grace? (256 – 57)
APRIL 2
Absentee Landlord
F
our parables in Matthew 24-25 have a common theme lurking in the
background. Consider: an owner who leaves his house vacant, an absentee
landlord who puts his servant in charge, a bridegroom who arrives so late the
guests fall asleep, a master who distributes talents among his servants and takes
off.
In effect, Jesus’ four parables anticipated the central question of the modern
era, asked by the likes of Nietzsche, Marx, Camus, and Beckett. “Where is God
now?” The modern answer is that the landlord has abandoned us. We are free to
set our own rules. Deus absconditus.
Reading on, I came to one more parable. I knew well the message of the
Sheep and the Goats, but I had never noticed its connection with the parables
that precede it. This last parable answers the question raised by the others, the
issue of the absentee landlord, in two ways.
First, it gives a glimpse of the landlord’s return, on judgment day, when
there will be hell to pay—literally.
Second, the parable gives an insight into the meantime, the mean time, the
centuries-long interval when God seems absent. Matthew 25’s answer is at once
profound and shocking. God has not absconded at all, but instead has taken on a
most unlikely disguise of the stranger, the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, the
sick, the ragged ones of earth. “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of
the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.”
Jesus’ final parable leaves the church with a heavy burden, yet one that
offers the only lasting solution for the world. We must oppose anarchy by
insisting that there is a leader, a landlord for the entire planet who, unlike some
policemen, will dispense perfect justice. Furthermore, until the landlord’s return
it is up to us to demonstrate God’s presence. We reach out to needy places not
out of paternalism, but out of love. By serving the needy, we serve God in
disguise.
“Back Page” column, Christianity Today,
July 20, 1992 (64)
APRIL 3
Free Partners
N
o one can reduce to a formula the secret to close communion with God. The
English bishop Hugh Latimer wrote to a fellow martyr, “I am sometimes so
fearful, that I would creep into a mouse-hole; sometimes God doth visit me again
with his comfort. So he cometh and goeth.” We may experience a spiritual high
one day and spend the next month wandering in the desert. “The wind blows
wherever it pleases,” Jesus told Nicodemus. So he cometh and goeth.
On the hill behind my mountain home, each spring a pair of red foxes raises
a litter of kits. When I whistle a greeting, sometimes the young ones poke their
faces out the crevice in the rock, sniffing the air and staring at me with alert,
shiny eyes. Sometimes I hear them scrabbling around inside. Sometimes I hear
nothing and assume them asleep. Once, when a visitor from New Zealand
stopped by, I took him to the den, warning him that he may see and hear nothing
at all. “They are wild animals, you know,” I said. “We’re not in charge. It’s up to
them whether they make an appearance or not.”
A bold young fox did poke his nose out of the den that day, thrilling my
visitor, and a few weeks later I received a letter from him, now back home in
New Zealand. As he reflected on it, oddly enough, my comment about foxes
helped him understand God. He had just gone through a long season of
depression. Sometimes God seemed as close as his wife or children. Sometimes
he had no sense of God’s presence, no faith to lean on. “God is wild, you know,”
he wrote. “We’re not in charge.”
“Come near to God and he will come near to you,” wrote James, in words
that sound formulaic. James does not put a time parameter on the second clause,
however. He reminds me that keeping company with God involves two parties,
and I have an important role to play in the relationship. As James suggests, I can
purify my heart and humble my spirit. I am learning to take responsibility for my
part and then leave the rest to God.
Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (207 – 8)
APRIL 4
Unanswered Prayer
A
s I was writing on unanswered prayer, my wife recommended that I interview
some senior citizens about prayer. “Most of them pray, and they’ve been at it a
long time,” she said. “Surely they’ll have some wisdom for you.”
She was right. I accompanied her to the retirement center where she assists
as a chaplain, and I heard one miracle story after another. One woman had felt a
sudden urge to leave a card game and go home. As she walked in the door she
saw that a candle had burned to the nub, igniting a bouquet of plastic roses—a
fire she was able to smother with a pillow just in time. Another told of
remarkable survival stories from World War II. Another told of her husband
choking on a homemade cinnamon roll, just as two paramedics walked past who
saved his life by performing the Heimlich maneuver.
I heard, too, of prayers for world peace and against injustice. One African-
American senior reminisced about praying while growing up as a second-class
citizen in the South. Who could imagine then the changes she would live
through?
Although I probed for accounts of unanswered prayers, most of the seniors
preferred to talk about answered prayers. All could tell of family tragedies and
health breakdowns, but somehow these events did not shake their faith in prayer.
After our meeting, however, I wandered through a portion of the facility
that cares for seniors who need more assistance. They lay in beds or sat in
wheelchairs. I tried talking to these seniors too, but the lights in their minds had
gone out. Any secrets they had learned about prayer lay hidden beyond retrieval.
I drove away from the facility more convinced than ever that the only final
solution to unanswered prayer is Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians: “For now
we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but
then shall I know even as also I am known.” No human being, no matter how
wise or how spiritual, can interpret the ways of God, explain why one miracle
and not another, why an apparent intervention here and not there. Along with the
apostle Paul, we can only wait, and trust.
Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (247)
