A Significant Life
From the Series: Fearless
Speaker: Gary Haugen
Date: August 29, 2010
Leave a comment | Back to Media Page
Transcript
Gary Haugen
{video: NBC news clip about International Justice Mission}
It’s great to get to be here with you. It’s a marvelous thing that I get to be here as you are embarking on a very ambitious agenda of considering what it means to be fearless in following God and his passions in the world. It’s appropriate, I think, that NCC has an ambitious agenda like that, so tonight, I thought we’d take a few minutes to talk about what we do when the will of God seems scary.
What do we do when the will of God seems scary?
I hope that before we’re done this evening, the strongest thing that you will feel and sense growing within you is hope. But that’s not going to come from me coming up with some words, it will come from the ministry of the Holy Spirit and from the power of the Word of God. So if we might, let’s take a moment now to ask Him for that. Let’s ask Him to speak to us a word of truth that is from Him that will actually give us life-transforming hope. Pray with me.
Kind Father, thank You for giving us life and for saving our lives and for giving us such a great call to go into the world and to demonstrate your love and your power and your justice and your goodness so that glory might be brought to You. Father, these are deep things and we feel our hearts yearning for deep and good things, but we ask You know O God that You might do your work of transformation. Would You give us some word of truth from You that would actually make us different? We ask you for this in the name of your son Jesus, Amen.
One of the greatest joys of my life in this particular season of my life is that I get to coach my boys in football. I’ve been coaching them since they were little pee-wees. They are starting to get grown up now, but I get to coach little boys in contact football. By contact football, I mean they put on the helmets and the shoulder pads and basically they get to knock each other on the ground. It’s hard to believe that so much fun is actually legal, but it is and it is just marvelous. One of the fascinating moments in contact football occurs for these boys early on in the season, especially for the new boy to contact football, and that’s the magic moment that he suddenly discovers that contact football is about contact. At first, maybe he has seen football on television and so it looks like football is a big party in a stadium, and that seems exciting. Then he has listened to all the commentators and the analyst and he tempted to think that football is about being clever and figuring out the right plays. Then he actually gets to show up for his first day of football practice, and at first, it is non-contact practice, it is conditioning practice, so he thinks it’s about running fast and catching the ball and running through the cones. But finally, he issued his equipment. The bright and shiny helmet and the broad shoulder pads and he gets the gear together and he runs home to show him family and runs down the street to show his friends. So for a while, football is all about the gear and the uniform. After all of this, there eventually does come the first day of contact practice, and this new boy finds himself in a serious of shocking collisions that seem surprisingly intentional and for which no one is offering an apology. Shortly thereafter, there is the magic epiphany when the boy discovers that contact football is about contact. In such a moment, the new boy is actually forced by reality to make a choice. Does he really want to be a football player or not? Sometimes boys need help in clarifying this question. I can actually remember the moment when my mother clarified this for me. I was coming home in the car from one of my early contact practices as a new pee-wee football player and I told my mom that I had had enough. I didn’t want to go to practice anymore. And knowing a thing or two about her little 8-year-old pee-wee, my mom simply said, “Oh.” Then she let me sit in the lack of her enthusiastic affirmation of my decision and then she simply said, “I suppose you can just turn in your uniform and equipment to the coach tomorrow.” This suggestion was, of course, horrifying to me. I, after all, loved football. At least I loved the idea of football, and I looked pretty fabulous in the uniform! I was making I could be just the kind of football player who wore the uniform without all that contact stuff. My mom, however, helped me to see that the contact stuff was precisely what football was about.
After encouraging me past the shock of the first few bumps, I found that I really was a football player, because I truly love what football is about, the contact. Now, it might have been sweet of my mom to let me avoid the bruises and bumps of the practices and games and let me just hold on to the uniform for the season and pretend that I was a football player. My mom could have acted like it was possible to be both a football player and to avoid contact and to pretend that a choice wasn’t necessary, but that wouldn’t have been true, and thankfully she loved me more profoundly than that, and gloriously she allowed me to discover what became one of the great joys of my childhood.
I think good parents help their kids clarify the reality of life’s choices. And God, our heavenly Father, is a good parent. He likewise loves us deeply enough to clarify the actual choices of life. The truth about these choices isn’t always easy for me to hear, but I’m so glad he doesn’t withhold the best by failing to tell me the truth. And here is one choice that our heavenly Father wants us, his followers, to understand, one very important choice – do we want to be safe or do we want to be brave – because we cannot be both.
Clarity about this choice is, I think, the fundamental choice of this culture and of this generation. Gently, lovingly, our heavenly Father wants us to know that we simply can’t be both. One the one hand, all of us do carry a great yearning to be brave. We want to be people of courage. Indeed, what is uglier and less attractive than cowardice? We admire and exalt the courageous. We return to it again and again in literature and in art and in the cinema to catch even the glimpse of a brave heart. We’ll go again and again to see it. Indeed, who, for example, wouldn’t want to be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? When an entire empire was bowing down before this idolatrous king, who wouldn’t want to be among the very few, the very few, who just very calmly looked Nebuchadnezzar in the eye and said, ‘Oh Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, let Him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you o king that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.’ Wow! I want to be like that.
But on the other hand, I don’t ever want to be like that! I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I have to be like that, right? I’d like to be brave but I’d also like to be safe. My heavenly Father, on the other hand, loves me deeply enough to tell me the truth. He tells me I can’t be both brave and safe. He wants me to be clear that there is a choice and He wants me to choose to be brave, and choosing to be brave means choosing not to be safe.
What does this all means? It brings us to the question I mentioned at the outset, and that is – what do we do when the will of God is scary? Well first, we might look at the question – is God’s will ever supposed to be scary? Isn’t God supposed to take care of me? Isn’t He supposed to keep me from danger and make me safe? In fact, aren’t I probably out of God’s will if I’m feeling in a scary situation? Well, according to Jesus – No! In fact, it turns out that God’s will, in a fallen world, is inherently dangerous. Over and over again in Scripture, Jesus teaches us that his disciples will suffer for following Him. Of course, we will avoid a lot of suffering from following Him as well. We will avoid the suffering of guilt; we will avoid the suffering of self-destruction, of addiction and of hell. But there are other kinds of suffering we will encounter precisely because we are following Him and He just wants us to be clear about that.
In the Scripture reading that I want to direct our attention to is from I Peter. It says:
Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Keep your conscience clear so that when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame, for it is better to suffer for doing good if that should be God’s will than to suffer for doing evil.
So according to this passage, some suffering can clearly be God’s will. It isn’t necessarily the suffering itself that is God’s will, be clear about this, but rather following the will of God in a fallen world will generate suffering in our lives. In fact, if you think about it, there are two things that are always the will of God and always dangerous in a fallen world. They are telling the truth and loving needy people. Those are always both the will of God and both are always dangerous. In fact, if my life of following Jesus doesn’t feel dangerous, I should probably pause and check to see if it’s Jesus I’m following. If I’m playing football and no one is hitting me, I should check to see if I’m out on the field. Doing what Jesus does, telling the truth and loving needy people is unsafe in a fallen world of lies and selfishness.
We have had, perhaps, a fair bit of discussion in our churches about the dangers that do accompany telling the truth, so I want to spend a little more time on this other danger, this dangerous activity that Jesus invites all of us to, which is - loving needy people. Let’s be clear that that is what following Jesus is about. Jesus said all the teaching of the law and the prophets could be summed up in these two commands: love God and love your neighbor, especially the needy neighbor. In fact, in I John it says that we shouldn’t think that we can love the God we can’t see if we aren’t loving the neighbor that we can see. It also says that if our neighbor is in need and we don’t respond, the love of God isn’t even in us.
Football is about contact and following Jesus is about loving needy people. But loving needy people, it turns out, is not safe. In fact, in my daily life, I generally try to keep neediness away from me. I’m busy enough with my own neediness, I don’t need everyone else’s neediness, thank you. Think about those in your family who are most needy and hurting; those in your church fellowship who are hurting the most; those in your community who are in the most need; those in the difficult parts of this city who are most vulnerable; picture them in your mind, serving them and loving them will be uncomfortable. It is messy, it is unsafe and can even be dangerous. Yet, paradoxically, Jesus tells us this is where the deepest joy is to be found. Either He knows what He is talking or we should stop pretending like He does. Based on the experience that my colleagues and I have had at International Justice Mission, I think what He is saying is true. It is not safe but it is true.
As many of you know, IJM is a collection of Christian lawyers and criminal investigators and social workers and we take on cases of violent abuse that occurs in the poorest communities around the world; cases of slavery and sex-trafficking and illegal detention and police abuse, land theft, all kinds of abuses where the problem is violence. We try to do four things: we try to bring rescue to the victims, get them out of the clutches of a violent people; we also try to bring the perpetrators to justice, to restrain the strong man; then also to bring after-care to the victims; and then to begin to address what is broken within the public justice system in that community so that the local authorities begin to protect their own people from these abuses.
As you might know, we started out with just a handful of us here in Washington D.C. and now we have about 400 full-time staff in 18 offices around the world. The vast majority of my colleagues are nationals who serve in their own communities providing a biblical witness for justice in their own community. At IJM, we specifically try to love the neighbors who are suffering because of violence, violent abuse and oppression, and as you can imagine, this just isn’t safe. For example, let me tell you about this one category of neighbors we are trying to love, and that’s the category of our global neighbors who are slaves. There are about 27 million people held illegally in slavery in the world today. My colleagues and I have met thousands of them by name. For instance, I met a woman in India named Shibea. She and her family live locked in a rice mill. It has a concrete wall around it and there are about 100 other slaves inside the rice mill. They work 7 days a week generally about 18 hours a day boiling, raking, drying, bagging and carrying rice. If anyone tries to run away, they are chased down, brought back to the mill and beaten in front of the others. Their children all work, they don’t go to school, they don’t play, they work day in and day out. The women, all of them have been sexually assaulted by the owner and the henchmen that run this facility. Think about it, picture these neighbors in your mind, Shibea and the others in this rice mill, loving them is not going to be safe. How do you love these neighbors in such a violent place?
John Richman was a young lawyer on the fast-track with a successful law firm in Roanoke, Virginia. Then he heard that IJM needed a lawyer to help slaves like Shibea in this rice mill. Of course, packing up his rice and young family to go to confront violent slave owners, this wasn’t safe. But sometimes the will of God is scary because He is asking us to choose between being brave or being safe in order to effectively and meaningfully love those who are in need.
But not only is loving others not safe, but even worse, perhaps, it doesn’t seem smart. John’s colleagues and associates at his law firm totally scoffed at him and his decision to go. ‘What do you mean you’re going to rescue slaves? It will never work. You’ll walk like a fool into a buzz-saw, you will imperil your family, you will have no future, you are a fool.’ Honestly, they felt free to tell him that he was an idiot to go do this. The fact is this, your choice as a follower of Jesus to be brave instead of smart will be so threatening to those who are smart rather than brave. The Bible says that they will actually malign you, not congratulate you. Darn, huh! But in John’s situation, that was what it was going to take in order to show the love of Christ to Shibea in a way that was actually meaningful to her.
Sometimes we have to decide, are we going to love or are we going to look smart, because loving the needy doesn’t look smart. And this is just a word in particularly for us here in Washington D.C. and in this culture. To be honest, one of our deepest fears is looking like a fool. A little unsophisticated, a little naïve, a little too earnest, looking like a loser who serves the poor because they probably couldn’t get a job doing anything else. I know people who do jobs that are horrific because they just don’t want people to think they are a loser. They don’t like their jobs, they could be doing jobs that actually change people’s lives, but they do jobs they hate, but at least the social circle around them affirms them.
Sometimes you have to make a choice between doing that which is loving or doing that which seems smart to the world.
Finally, not only is it not safe and not the smart thing to do to try to love people like Shibea, but it also doesn’t match the image of the successful. There is no wealth in it, there is very little regard. John Richman has actually returned from his years of service in India and I can certify that he is neither wealthy nor famous. But I also can certify that Shibea is no longer a slave. John was able to send his investigators on a daring undercover operation that exposed the terrors inside the rice mill, mobilized a police operation and actually rescued the slaves out, and eventually we were able to see the slave owner convicted of the crime of slavery and he now sits in a prison serving a very long sentence. I’ve actually been with Shibea and the other released slaves and I’ve seen them proudly show off their personal emancipation proclamation certificates that certify that they were once required to labor under the threat of death, but now they are free. John and our Indian team have been able to provide them with land, houses, livestock and micro-loans so they can now have their own lives of dignity and freedom. I’ve seen all this with my own eyes. And while none of the outcomes of John’s work have brought him the rewards of success that the prevailing culture usually offers, it does match our Savior’s most beautiful description of significance.
Jesus Christ says that significance is found in transforming people’s lives through love. That is a significant life. Occasionally, history will validate the significance of a life that didn’t look successful at the time. For instance, few would have thought that Harriet Tubman looked very successful in the 1850’s, an illiterate run-away slave woman who managed to rescue scores of slaves in the Underground Railroad. But if you go look at any little kid’s history text book in elementary school now, who is the picture of a significant life? Harriet Tubman is there every time, which makes it all the more interesting to consider that John and his team was able to rescue with their team four times as many slaves as Harriet Tubman ever did in her entire lifetime of work on the Underground Railroad. John fortunately had the law on his side in a way that Harriet Tubman did not, but someone had to help bring the law to violent brick factories, rice mills and plantations in India. Amazingly, John did this.
There simply is, in our hurting world, just overwhelming opportunity for significance. In fact, our IJM team in India has launched what is perhaps the most serious hands-on Christian confrontation against slavery that has occurred in 150 years. And the work goes on now with Indian nationals leading it who were trained by John. And John and Linda and their children actually just live quietly among you here in Washington D.C. and now he is building the kingdom of God as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sometimes the will of God is scary because he is asking us to choose between a life that looks successful and a life that is actually significant; a life that wins the applause of our peers or a life that actually transforms lives through love. But sometimes it just becomes a bit confusing. Are we seeking success or are we seeking significance? Jesus tried to be clear about all of this with his disciples. He said in Luke 9:24:
For those who want to save their lives will lose it and those who lose their lives for my sake will save it.
Another colleague of mine, Sean Litton, used to call himself a mad scientist of this divine paradox, that you get your life by losing it. The hypothesis is that you’ll find your life when you lose it, so Sean decided to throw his life away in the hope of having it saved. And being a proper mad scientist, he tried first by doing an experiment and testing it on himself, and then on his wife and two kids. Let me share how he did it.
These are his words. He says:
IJM needed people to go overseas. I was not so afraid of going as I was of coming back. I was at the top of my profession. I could do anything I wanted. I was a lawyer at one of the premier firms here in Washington D.C. If I went overseas for three or four years to work for some little Christian group, I was sure I would come back to a crappy job and work with crappy people, live in a crappy house and wear crappy slacks as I drink my crappy coffee while driving my crappy car! But I just thought, ‘If I can rescue one child, if I could rescue one child from the unspeakable horrors of prostitution, it would outweigh any sacrifice I could possibly make.’ How could any sacrifice I made possibly compare to the daily abuse and suffering of a child forced to work in a brothel forced to be assaulted and defiled 20 times a day. It was like math, no emotion, I did not have the faith that God could actually provide for me and that I might actually find joy in it, no, I just expected to be lonely and to suffer but I signed on to try to save that one child.
What happened as Sean went out to launch our first office in the Philippines and then to run our office in Thailand and then all of Southeast Asia and now he runs all of our global field offices around the world? God actually used Sean and his team to rescue hundreds of women and girls from commercial sexual exploitation, and they virtually shut down sexual exploitation and the commercial sex trade in three different cities in Southeast Asia. All of this through the power of a very great God working through a very common vessel, but a vessel that made the choice between being safe or being brave.
Interestingly, what Sean seems to remember most is not the hundreds that were rescued, but the one. Sean put it this way. He said, “I looked into the eyes of a 15-year-old girl who had been brutally raped two years previously and had no one to do anything to help her, and I was able to tell her ‘God loves you, I know He loves you because He sent me here to help you. I don’t know what will happen but I will fight for you.’ The man who raped her, who was the son of a police officer, is now serving a life sentence for that crime. The 15-year-old girl is now a radiant 23-year-old college student studying social work in a university so that she can help abused girls. Jesus said this, that if you want to save your life, you will lose it. Sean tested the proposition and found Jesus’s promise to be true. But he almost missed it. What were the things that held him back? The things that almost led him to miss it, he said four things: first – comfort, the state of contented well-being, or for us, a nice pillow and a couch and air conditioning and a vanilla latte. That was the first simple thing holding him back, comfort. Second was security, the freedom from danger. Third, control, the power over circumstances and events to achieve a desired outcome. He was going to lose control. Fourth, success, that is to say the appearance of wealth and the high regard of his peers. Comfort, security, control and success. These were the four things Sean said he had to let go of to get the life that Jesus promised. What does that life from Jesus look like? What do you get on the other side of the exchange? This is what Sean says, “You get adventure; you get faith; you get miracles, authentic miracles of the power of God that is not the power of you; and a deep knowledge of Jesus.” Well, don’t we all want those four things? We all want adventure; we all want faith, we want to participate in miracles and we want deep knowledge of Jesus. If so, Jesus is telling me that I have to choose. Jesus is saying, gently, lovingly, ‘You just can’t have adventure, miracles, faith and deep knowledge of Me while still holding on to comfort, security, control and success.’ It’s just math.
Jesus invites me to choose what I really want to do, what I really want to be, safe or brave.
Where today might you and I be brave in loving those who are hurting for the world? Is it caring for a family member who is in need? Is it persevering in a hard relationship? Volunteering with your small group at the Southeast Whitehouse or at Habitat for Humanity might be brave. Serving vulnerable immigrant neighbors in own community might be brave. Helping out the local rape crisis shelter might be brave. Giving generously of your finances to help those in need can be brave. Going on one of your church’s overseas missions trips could be brave. The list goes on and on. Perhaps I can make psychological room for such things by off-loading some of the other fears and anxieties I carry around that don’t actually have anything to do with loving other people at all. They have to do with smaller things, smaller things that Jesus is eager to take away with the great embrace of his love.
I think we’ve all had moments when we were brave when we needed to be. I bet you’ve had those moments. I’ve had an occasional one and I sense that there within me a capacity to be brave, and there is within you the God-given capacity for courage. The simple question is – how can we have more of that in our lives? How can we be just a little more brave tomorrow?
Here are a few short suggestions.
Number one, do less and reflect more. Do less and reflect more. Reflect about the life that you are living. Reflect about the anxieties I carry, about the life that I feel God calling me to. Pause and think. At IJM every morning, we begin every morning with 30 minutes of silence. Everybody gets paid for a half hour of doing absolutely nothing in the first 30 minutes of the day, to sit completely still and to prepare spiritually for the day, to reflect upon what is true so we can be equipped to be brave in the day.
Number two, search the promises of Scripture and then take a risk. See whether the promises are true. You’ve just got to be the mad science. You’ve got to say, ‘It says that, here I go.’ If it doesn’t work out for you, you can say it is all a bunch of lies. Search the promises in Scripture and take a risk. If you are wrestling with some sort of decision or something to do, just imagine for a moment, ‘Am I being brave or am I being safe?’ In the end, it will be a question of whether or not God is trustworthy. Listen to Christ’s word when He says: Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both the soul and the body, for are not two sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father, and even the hairs on your head are all counted. So, do not be afraid. You are more valuable than sparrows. Let’s cling to the promises of Scripture and live as if they are actually true.
Number three, embark on the life-long journey of spiritual formation and renovation of the heart. It is not by the sheer will inside us that we become brave. It takes reformation of our heart, and God doesn’t call us to try to be brave, He calls us to train to be brave. It is not something we arrive at tomorrow, but hopefully, by the grave of God, it is something we are entering into more deeply day by day, year by year. Two resources I’d like to recommend on this spiritual formation is Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard or The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg. These are both beautiful resources for beginning this reformation of the heart.
For us at IJM, we are inviting Christian to also enter into the journey of justice. I think God gives his people the ministry of justice, yes, so we can rescue the victims of injustice, but just as much because it rescues the rest of us from lives of small fear, lives of triviality, because it transports us into a struggle against real evil and violence and we immediately need God badly! You want to see jet fuel put to your spiritual life, need God badly. You won’t need anybody to jack you up to go pray, you’ll be praying because you need God. If you embark with us in the work for justice, you will pray with great joy and earnestness in the experience of God.
We have a table set up for you to pick up a few of these resources. One of the little cards that we invite you to fill out are cards that were taken to members of the Senate hoping it would encourage them in their support of the Child Protection Compact Act. I encourage you to fill this out and we will hand-deliver these to Senator Holmes and Senator Web who serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is a piece of legislation which simply authorized the U.S. government to really come along countries that are battling with slavery but are losing that fight, and allow the voice and values of the United States to come alongside and help them. So if you fill this out, it helps boost them in doing that, but it also gives us your contact information so that you can join us in the work for justice. If you don’t want to be connected with us, still fill this out but just mark the little box that says you don’t want to be contacted.
The second thing we have is resources for getting deeply into the Scripture about God’s teaching for justice. Many of us are disengaged from the circle of justice because we’ve never gone deeply to the Scriptures where we are taught about it. So there are resources available there for you as well.
Finally, I urge you to keep your eyes and ears open here at NCC because I think there is a growing partnership here with IJM to see ways in which the gifts and talents of NCC can be used to grow the work of justice in the world. You are already engaged in the world. How can we make deeper and stronger the work of justice? We will be doing that together.
I’m so glad that my mom helped me see the truth about choosing about being a real football player, because for a little while, I got to be one, not a good one, but at least I was one. In doing so, she provided a path to one of the greatest joys of my life. Likewise, Jesus wants us to know that we are so well-taken care of by Him that it is actually safe to be brave. Can I say that again? Jesus wants you to know, it was almost his whole message to us, is that we are so well-taken care of by God, our heavenly Father, that it is safe to be brave.
Do you remember what Lucy said in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when she encounters the lion Aslan for the first time? She asks, because he is a lion, she asks, “Is he safe?” The answer, of course, is, “No, he is not safe, but he is good.” Likewise Jesus is inviting us into a life with Him that is not safe but it is good. Pray with me please.
Kind Father, thank You for the gentleness and patience with which You allow us to know You more deeply. I pray that You might take what we have shared together here and that You would embed in our hearts some word that may be of You and that You would not have us be people exiting this room today as exactly the same people who came in, but that we would be changed and transformed by your word, to be just a little braver tomorrow than we were yesterday. We pray these things in the good name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
