The book's next-to-last chapter, 'The Lord I've Come to Know,' is, I feel, its best. "A crucial stage in the growth of my faith came when I began to see that the teachings of Christ could be applied to secular existence," Carter writes. That has certainly been true of my faith journey.
Back when I was twenty-two years old, married two years, my wife's pastor came for a visit to our apartment. "I've come to ask you to be the junior high youth group leaders," he said. I was taken aback. "I'm not even a Lutheran," I told him. That statement was true enough. But I failed to tell him the whole truth: I was an atheist.
Yet, my wife and I got involved in youth group. I saw the impact that Christ had on the lives of the church's young people and their parents. They weren't play-acting. The God they said they'd come to know through Christ was real to them and he had an impact on them.
On top of that, for the first time in my life, I felt as though through our work with the youth, I was actually accomplishing something. Yet, I couldn't see that I was actually doing anything at all. An unseen hand was working in my life. I got involved in the ministry (a word meaning, service) of Christian faith and through it, God actually spawned faith in me. I began to see that a living God made it possible, in Carter's phrase, to apply Christ's teachings "to a secular existence."
Carter writes movingly and convincingly about this experience:
Previously, I'd focused my daily activities on ambitions...All of these goals I achieved.
The first real defeat in my life had come in 1966, when I lost the governor's race to a racist opponent...I felt that God had let me down. After all, I thought, I've done a pretty good job of being a Christian! Don't I deserve better than this?
Carter then speaks of the mission trips he took to the North and which I've described in another post. Working side-by-side with humble Christians who shared their faith in simple ways, Carter gained what he calls "my first exposures to the miraculous qualities of Christianity."
"But," he writes, "it also brought home to me in a stronger way than ever before the disparity between my secular ambitions and the example of Jesus Christ."
Then come these two amazing paragraphs:
When I turned to the Gospels, the Jesus I met had a very different way of life from the one I was building for myself and my family. Jesus had no money, no possessions, no house; he turned away from his mother, brothers, and sisters; he was abandoned in time of trouble by his friends and followers; and he died when he was still a young man. How could this be my God?
I began to realize that when I envisioned a supreme being, he was more like Muhammad, the founder of Islam, a patently successful man in earthly terms: a powerful warrior, political leader, founder of a great institutional church. This was in many ways the opposit of the Jesus of the Gospels, or the image of the "suffering servant" in Isaiah, whom Christians identify with Christ: physically unattractive, uneloquent, scorned, rejected. The more I thought about the discrepancy between my image of God and the image in the Gospels, the more it tortured me, not for Jesus' sake but for mine---because I was so different from the divine human being I claimed to worship.
Back when I was an atheist, I wrestled with an image of God very like that promoted by Islam: an implacable war-God Who delighted in befuddling and lording things over finite, almost witless people like me. (I sometimes struggle with similar images of God.) Such a God might be feared or even loved in a sick, co-dependent way. But He could hardly be considered a liberator of the human spirit, a gracious forgiver of sin, or a Deity Whose love for me might in turn, incite love for Him in me or desire for intimacy with Him.
But in Jesus, we meet a different God: Perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient, to be sure; but also compassionate, giving.
Contrary to the pseudo-religion being hyped in some contemporary best-selling books, the notion of Jesus' deity was not a late development. Within just a few years of His death and resurrection, Christians are recording conversations in which Jesus affirmed His God-ness, as did His followers.
Sometime between 53 and 60 A.D., for example, the evangelist and preacher Paul writes about Jesus from a prison cell where he's incarcerated for his faith in Christ:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15-20)
The apostle John writes of Jesus:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father's heart, Who has made Him known. (John 1:17)
And yet this Jesus, as Carter came to know, makes God not just knowable, but desirable. Paul writes about this, apparently quoting a hymn that had already become current among the early Christians (yes, I quote this passage all the time):
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:4-11)
In all the other world religions, a distant God must be reached by human effort, through obeying laws or requirements of righteousness. The Christian faith is the only religion that recognizes our human inability to reach God. But in Christ we see that God is willing to reach all the way down into the depths of human experience to touch us.
The Bible puts it this way:
But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. [Romans 3:21-26]
In Jesus we meet the God of the universe Who is a God of grace, anxious to have us turn from sin and turn to Him for life, everlasting life He offers for free. When this life enters those with faith in Christ, it frees them to entertain what I would call a holy discontent, what Jimmy Carter described as an awareness of the disparity between Christ and himself. It also empowers us, once again using a phrase of Carter's, to apply Christ's teachings "to a secular existence." That becomes easier to do when you live in the daily assurance that whether we live or die, we belong to Christ forever.
Carter talks about this. He says that going on Habitat for Humanity building trips in dangerous inner-city areas of America sometime presents daunting risks. At one project in Miami, he says, one of the volunteers with whom he was working was killed by a pistol shot. But, he writes that:
The awareness that my God walked this way before me makes it possible to sustain such an effort.
The Lord he's come to know, Jimmy Carter says, is very different from the stern Maker he once pictured Him to be. He writes gratefully:
To emulate the perfect life of Jesus and to comply with his teachings is impossible. God, being perfect, cannot condone sinfulness, and the punishment of our violation of divine laws is separation from God. But through our faith in Christ, who was perfect and who personfies grace and truth, we can be totally forgiven and reconciled with God, for "the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23)
I heartily recommend Living Faith, this great testament of faith in Jesus Christ, written by our thirty-ninth President.
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