My New Friend Larry

By David Hobbs

I was getting on the freeway in Sacramento to drive home to Marysville when I spied a hitchhiker at the onramp. “Where you going?” I asked the older man.
“Marysville.”
“Well you’re in luck, my friend, climb in.”
His name was Larry, Larry Watkins. He’d been waiting at the onramp for 3 hours in the cold. He was actually heading to Oroville, north of Marysville, where he lived.
I’m always looking for the divine connection in everything unusual that happens in my life. “Lord why did you have me pick Larry up? What do you want to say to him? I pray for Your guidance.”
We got to talking. He grew up in Oklahoma, was a veteran from the Viet Nam War, on Social Security disability. Larry mentioned the Lord a few times so I figured he’d opened the subject. “So you’re a Christian then?”
He admitted he was, though he said he wasn’t a church attender, and it was fairly obvious he was not a current practitioner. We talked about my church and my faith. Then he told me about his family, and their strong faith back in Oklahoma. Stirred by the memories, he related how he would study the Bible as a kid and then preach messages to his dad, messages that often brought tears to his father’s eyes. “You gonna be a fine preacher someday Larry,” his father used to tell him.
Warming to his subject, he began preaching to me, telling me of the power, glory and love of God and His total faithfulness. “I believe you’ve still got some preacher left in you,” I told him, to which he preached even more fervently.
Then the Holy Spirit reminded me of something. There was a time in my life I would have been interrupting Larry in order to share with him the importance of getting back into church. I would have been looking for opportunities to lecture him on being faithful to his divine calling, that the Lord must have allowed me to pick him up for that very purpose: to admonish and challenge him to get his act together, and lecture lecture yada yada.
“Wow, that’s exactly what I would have been doing,” I admitted to the Holy Spirit. “that is what I’ve done with people over and over again!”
“Now isn’t this easier?” the Holy Spirit said. “Let him do it, let his own words remind and convict and encourage and strengthen him. You don’t have to do a thing: just relax, listen, and let him convict himself. It’s a lot easier for Me to use his own words to prod him later than your judgmental ones!”
After that I sat back, drove on and listened to Larry relive his glory days, not even tempted to jump in with the charge, “So what happened? Why aren’t you still serving God? Why aren’t you fulfilling the prophecy of your father?” We all get derailed by life from time to time. That’s why the Bible calls us sheep. Have you ever seen a sheep-trail? They wander all over the place.
Larry was hungry so I took him home and cooked him a good breakfast before taking him to the edge of town to catch a ride the rest of the way to Oroville. I gave him my card with my phone number and asked him to call me. No lectures, just love, meeting needs, and letting him paint the picture of his desired future with his own words. There’s the picture Larry; now it’s up to you to go after it and get it! After listening to my dad speak a church preaching engagement into being for me a few months before in Ohio (see previous post, “My Dad the Prophet,” of 11/22/09), I was sufficiently impressed with the power of the spoken word to let him run with it.
I don’t know for certain if Larry will be able to recover his walk with the Lord, but it is a lot more likely to happen than if I’d self-righteously lectured him on what he was doing wrong and how he’d failed God.

Battle for Reality

By David Hobbs

When the people asked Jesus, “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” Jesus answered them simply, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” [John 6:28-29]
The Word of God has a remarkable way of zeroing in on the heart of any issue it deals with. The hardest thing we have to do, and something I struggle with every day, is just that: to truly believe Jesus—what he said and what the Bible says about Him. “But how is that hard?” you might ask. “I believe everything I am supposed to believe about Him: He’s the Son of God, born of a virgin, lived a sinless life ….”
Ah but here’s the rub. You’re giving mental assent to a list of historical facts or doctrines. James says, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” [James 2:19]. The dark side knows far more than we do about the facts concerning Jesus and His purpose for coming to earth. Such knowledge doesn’t save them and won’t save us either.
Almost every church has a Statement of Faith, a list of the doctrines they adhere to. But adherence to those doctrines, while it might enable you to join that church, will not ensure your fulfilling of Jesus’ commandment that you “believe on him whom [God] hath sent.”
In Scripture, “believe in” can always be equated to “trust in” and “obey.” We “believe in” Jesus Christ for eternal life if we “trust in” Him. But trust is exclusive. If we “trust in” Jesus for our salvation, we cannot “trust in” anything else such as our own goodness. We can’t trust the fact that our father was a preacher, our mother was a praying woman, we attended church all our lives—that would cancel out trusting in Christ.
Let me get to the crux of the issue. The Bible claims that Jesus Christ died so that I might live. More than that, it says He did this while I was His enemy—while I hated Him, denied Him, and used His Name as a curse word. What would I do if a man saved me at the expense of his own life. Say I was crossing the street when I collapsed from my trick knee. A truck was barreling toward me but a man came to my rescue, rolled me out of the way but couldn’t escape the truck himself and was killed. He gave up his life to save mine. What would/should my response be? Extreme gratefulness to him, and since he was no longer alive, to his family? Would I not want to do all in my power to see that his widow was provided for, that his children would get to go to college, or whatever the man wanted for them? Yes I should. Such sacrifice demands a response. And not to give it would reveal me to be a moral low-life, selfish and self-centered in the extreme.
How about in Jesus’ case? When the Bible says that he willingly gave up His life for me, even when I hated Him and wasn’t living up to His moral requirements, what ought my response to be? If I claim to believe that—give my mental assent to it as being true—and yet still live my life any old way I choose, what does that say about me? Either I am a despicable low-life who wasn’t worth dying for in the first place, or in my heart of hearts, despite what my mouth says, I don’t truly believe it.
The Bible says you can always tell what someone really believes (as opposed to what they say they believe) by their actions. When we don’t live any differently than the rest of the world which denies Christ altogether, do we truly believe?
If we believe that Jesus suffered and died for us, wouldn’t we want to respond the way He asked us to? Certainly! Then how does He want us to respond? 2 Cor. 5:15—“And [Jesus] died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.”
The proper response to Christ’s death for us, if we truly believe it, is for us to die to ourselves and what we want and live for Him. But too many people are content to give mental assent to the “facts” of His death and keep on living for themselves—by pursuing their own goals, pleasures, agendas, riches, fame, and power; by making a name for themselves, building their own businesses, ministries, families, and their own little empires here on earth. How can such people claim to believe Jesus died for them? Matt.15:8—“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 9 They worship me in vain…. Matt. 7:22—“Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did not we prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then will I tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers!’”
That gets us back to our title—“The Battle for Reality.” What is reality to us? Are the things the Bible claims--heaven and hell; eternity in one place or the other; an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God; Jesus and His death on the cross for us—is that the true reality? Or is the true reality what we see and experience every day in this world we live in? Remember, it’s not what we say we believe, but what we show we believe by how we live our lives.
Check out the books 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper and 23 Minutes in Hell by Bill Wiese. Is that what we believe: a literal heaven and a literal hell? Then if we believe that Jesus died that we might escape a forever in the place hell for a forever in the place heaven: if we truly believed that, then we should be spending the rest of our lives on earth in slobbering thankfulness to the One who has rescued us: “Thank you thank you thank you Jesus! What can I do for you? Do you want something to drink? How about some praise? Do you want me to witness to that guy? Spend all night in prayer? Be a martyr? Thank thank you thank you thank…!” That should be how we spend our lives if we truly believe. And that is the work of God for us to do: “believe on him whom he hath sent.”

Christ Within--The Hope of Glory: On Earth as it is in Heaven

Christ Within--The Hope of Glory: On Earth as it is in Heaven
www.americantowns.com/ca/marysville