Go Team!

In America a lot of our heroes are lone wolves. They embody our idolization of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. We love the hero who can do everything and needs no one else. Perhaps that's the reason that even the success of two British heroes, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, was dependent on their enthusiastic reception over here in America. An American publisher asked Arthur Conan Doyle for what turned out to be the second ever Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four. And it was President Kennedy's recommendation of the James Bond novels that kicked off 007's international success. These heroes personify what someone has called “competence porn”: the fantasy that the hero is super-competent at handing anything that is thrown at him. Holmes is not only super-smart, able to deduce what really happened from the smallest of clues and able to break the toughest of codes, but, when it is called for, he is good at boxing, sword fighting and martial arts. Bond is not only an assassin but, at least in the films, able to pilot any vehicle, from planes to submersible cars to spacecraft. He is also irresistible to women, an expert on wines and gourmet foods, and a competent gambler. But the ultimate American superhero is Superman, who has super-strength, super-speed, super-hearing, heat-vision, and can fly. Quite frankly, I don't know why he needs the Justice League of America. After Superman comes Batman, who, while he lacks superpowers, is an expert at all forms of fighting, and is super-smart, being touted as the “world's greatest detective” in his comics. It helps that he is rich and can afford every possible gadget he will ever need.

In reality no one person can do it all. Truly intelligent people know their limitations. They know their strengths and their weaknesses. And the wise know that they need others to achieve just about anything significant. The most creative person in the world still needs others to edit, publish, produce, play, display, distribute and disseminate what they write, script, paint, sculpt, or record. Scientists need a team to do research; they need grants to fund the research; they need a company or university to house their research; they need scientific journals to publish their findings. Cooks and bakers depend on farmers, food companies, and grocery stores for their ingredients, as well as those who make the stoves, appliances and utensils they use. Builders need a construction crew with skills in working with wood, steel and concrete, as well as plumbers and electricians. You only have to sit through a movie's credits to see the hundreds of people required to create the blockbuster you just enjoyed. My sermons depend on the many Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, concordances, and other books which I consult that scholars have written, as well as the internet, the people who made my computer, and the people who keep the electricity on.

We all are dependent on others. Even the lone survivalist who is building a bunker in the woods to sit out the collapse of civilization is dependent upon others for the building materials, tools, nonperishable foods, fuel, how-to books and weapons he needs. And it seems that this realization has permeated even our pantheon of heroes. The Avengers need the individual skills each hero brings to the fight. Aside from Robin, Batman relies on his butler Alfred, an honest cop named Gordon, and the R and D guy at Wayne Enterprises who makes those wonderful toys for him. Bond needs Q as well as the agents he leads when he invades the villain's well-guarded lair. Buffy the Vampire Slayer realizes that she has lived longer than slayers in the past due to her friends who help her research and fight the demons. The various incarnations of Star Trek have always focused on the crews of the ships. The Incredibles presented a family of superheroes as a team. One of the joys of the current series of Doctor Who is the fact that the Timelord's companions aren't just there to look pretty, ask him to explain what's going on and get captured by the monsters. The Doctor and his companions act as a team. In fact, a theme I enjoy is that the Doctor inspires ordinary people to emulate him in acting heroically and joining him in doing the right thing.

Don't you wish you had a team? Don't you wish you had friends with various powers who could back you up and help you in difficult situations? You do. All Christians do. And our team is called the Trinity.

I was struck by this analogy when reading an online interview where Anglican theologian J.I. Packer talked of the Trinity as a divine team. Like all analogies about God, it breaks down if you stretch it too far. But at its core are 2 key concepts about the Trinity: unity and individuality.

The difficulty of understanding the Trinity is trying to reconcile the idea of the oneness of God with the idea of 3 divine persons within God. Some people think it is a needless theological innovation. But it came about because of the way the church experiences God. The church started as a group of Jews. They were born into a covenant with the Creator of the world. The covenant stipulated, among other things, that there is one God and that they weren't to worship any other. Then they encountered Jesus. It was obvious that he was a prophet and that the Spirit of God was on him. Then they realized that he was the Messiah sent by God to set the world right. But Jesus wasn't what they expected. He wasn't a holy warrior but a healer and teacher. And when he was crucified, as far as they were concerned, it was over for him.

Then God raised him from the dead. They remembered that Jesus said, “Tear down this temple and in three days I will raise it up again.” (John 2:19) The temple, at least before the exile when the Holy of Holies contained the ark of the covenant, was the place where God dwelt with his people. The temple was, as N.T. Wright puts it, the place where heaven and earth overlap. The disciples saw how Jesus lived—sinless—and what he did—died to pay for the sins of the whole world—and realized that only God, who is holy and without sin, could do those things. Jesus was the new temple, where God dwells. (John 14:11) Jesus is the new point at which the realm of God and the world of man overlap. (John 1:1, 14) Jesus the man was somehow God. (John 10:30) And yet he said that there was one God. (Mark 12:29)

Then came Pentecost. The church was immersed in the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised God would send as another advocate. The then still Jewish church was familiar with the Holy Spirit from the Hebrew Bible, where the Spirit is described as the power of God. The Spirit is involved in creation, in anointing the leaders of God's people and in inspiring the prophets. So now the church experienced God in another way—inside their minds and hearts and lives.

So they knew God as the Creator who is outside of them and this world. Yet God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. (2 Corinthians 5:19) And God was in them, acting in and through the body of believers, applying the love and power of God to their lives and to their encounters with the world. (John 14:17; Romans 5:5) So the Father is God. Jesus is God. The Spirit is God. But there is only one God. They may not have known exactly how this worked but they knew it to be true.

Many a preacher on this, Trinity Sunday, has tried to explain the triune nature of God by using shamrocks or cubes or the tripartite nature of humanity or the 3 states of water. All of these might help a little but none can really speak comprehensively about the deep nature of God. Even the orthodox formula of the Trinity, which we recite in the Nicene Creed and find in full in the Athanasian Creed, is not really an explanation of how this is possible but is only a way of preserving the paradox of Three in One and One in Three.

All language about God is at least somewhat metaphorical. So here is another way to look at it. And as C. S. Lewis would say, if this picture doesn't help you, then leave it alone.

One advantage to seeing God as a team is that it preserves the unity of God as well as the individuality of the divine persons. Each member of a good team has a distinct role or function and yet a good team acts as one. They have one goal, one will. But unity doesn't mean uniformity. In fact, it is the various strengths of the different members coming together that gives the team its power. A big problem I have with the Mission:Impossible movies is that they are ultimately all about Tom Cruise's character Ethan Hunt. The TV series was about the team, all working on the same plan, coming from different directions and using their different abilities and functions.

In team Trinity we have the Father. He is the source of creation. He is the idea guy, you might say, the Jim Phelps or Professor X or Captain Picard or the coach of the team. He looks at the Big Picture. He conceives the strategy. He sets the tone of the team. He cares for the team; it is his family.

Next in team Trinity there is the Son, Jesus Christ. He's the one who executes the plan, who embodies the idea. In the Mission:Impossible TV series he is Roland Hand, the member of the team who goes undercover and becomes an actor in the drama which the idea guy has conceived. He's the quarterback, the James Bond who is sent out on a mission by M, the Mr. Spock who knowingly sacrifices himself to save the crew.

The toughest member of team Trinity to pin down is the Holy Spirit. He's the resource person. He's like Scotty in the original Star Trek, giving the captain more power or raising the shields when necessary. Or he's like Uhura, passing on vital communications. Or Troy in the Star Trek: The Next Generation, the empathic counselor who understands and articulates our deepest emotions. Or he's like Barney on the original IMF team or Briana on the Leverage team, always toiling behind the scenes to make sure that the technical stuff will work when the team needs them. Or maybe he's like Willy. Willy was the big guy on the TV IMF team, who helped Barney or drove the truck or carried a message to Jim or acted as a repairman or did any other unglamorous job that was necessary to the plan. The spotlight never focused on Willy, this jack-of-all-trades, but he was vital. He made sure that whatever had to be done got done.

This is the team that helps you live the Christian life. God the Father has mapped out the plan and knows all the possible deviations from it and has contingencies for them all. He has given us the principles by which we live and he is waiting for us when we finish our part of the mission and make it home safely.

God the Son has the hardest part of the Father's plan. He can walk us through the plan and we can trust him and confide in him because he is also one of us; he's been where we've been as well as where we are going and he knows what we face. He has been to hell and back and so he can help us face the direst of days.

God the Spirit works with us and in us and for us so that we follow the plan. He relays messages from the Father and the Son. He translates our deepest feelings to them. He gives us power and encouragement and support and counsel and whatever we need to help us follow the plan.

So we don't have to do this on our own. God said he would never leave us or forsake us. Jesus asked his Father to send his Spirit to help us. For God decided out of love to let us join his team on earth to accomplish the final part of his plan. And our part is to be ambassadors of God spreading his good news, agents of God demonstrating his love and forgiveness and power to transform lives. Because the plan is for God to reunite with his erring creatures, to remake his fallen creation and renew it. We are to recruit volunteers for his team and to support each other as we discover and do our part.

This is our task and we have all the resources of heaven at hand. We have access to the mind who dreamt up the universe and even ourselves and who, when we screwed it up with our arrogance, put in place the plan to set it all right. We have access to the one person who understands things from both our standpoint and God's and who also knows pain and joy and life and death firsthand. And we have access to the power that runs the universe and can remake us in the image of the one who created us and redeemed us and loves us. In every situation, through every peril, in sorrow and triumph, we have ahead of us as our goal, above us as our protection, beside us as our companion and within us as our compass, the divine team of the Father, the Son and the Spirit to lead us, equip us, encourage and help us. Glory be to our wonderful, multifaceted and quite singular God!

First preached on June 6, 2005. It has been updated and revised.

Happy Birthday

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21.

When you're a kid, your birthday is, after Christmas, the most anticipated day of the year. The closer it gets the more giddy you are. All you can think of are gifts and cake and a party with all your friends. After a certain age, your birthday is much less of a celebration and more of a nod to the passage of time. Maybe even a shrug. Your birthday only becomes a big deal again if you live to be very, very old. At the nursing home where I used to work, we had at one time 3 people who were 100 or more years old. You can bet they got big parties!

The Pentecost recounted in our passage from Acts took place somewhere between 27 and 33 AD. So Christianity is just a bit shy of 2000 years old. Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church because that's when it took its first breath, so to speak, apart from Jesus' physical presence. And before the invention of the stethoscope, breath was considered the vital sign that separated life from death. On Pentecost, the church came alive.

In both Greek and Hebrew, one word was used for breath, wind and spirit. The movement of air is a powerful but invisible force. Wind can be felt and its effects can be seen but wind itself cannot be seen. Neither can breath, except on very cold days and even then you don't see it for more than a second or two. It's easy to understand how breath came to be used as an analogy for spirit, the unseen but powerful force that gives us life.

Even today, when a baby is born, doctors and nurses are intent on clearing a newborn's airway and hearing that first cry. We rate the baby on a scale in which 3 of the 5 signs—the color of its extremities, its response to stimuli and the quality of its crying—are related to the adequacy of its respirations. A baby who doesn't get enough oxygen during the birth process is at risk for cerebral palsy. You may count your baby's fingers and toes when he or she is born; we nurses are looking to see if they are blue or not.

So it is natural to associate the coming of the Holy Spirit, appearing as a wind that shakes the building the apostles met in, with birth. Birth is a starting point and Pentecost is a good place to say the church first began to function as the body of Christ.

But before the descent of the Spirit on the church Pentecost was a major Jewish holiday. Called Shavuot, it was the 50^th day since Passover. It was the day when the first fruits of the spring crops were offered to God along with prayers for the rest of the harvest. It was also the time when Jews commemorated God giving the 10 commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai. (Exodus 20:1-17) That's why so many Jews from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem.

The parallels are easy to make. At Pentecost the first fruits of the church are brought in and offered to God. In that day followers of Jesus went from about 120 to 3000. (Acts 1:14; 2:41) A very promising start on the harvest to come.

God gave his people the law on a Pentecost 1200 to 1400 years before Christ. This Pentecost he sends his Holy Spirit, making a different way of living a godly life possible. So the church being born on this auspicious day is akin to a person being born on his grandfather's birthday.

But there is another Biblical event that relates to this Pentecost. In Genesis chapter 11, we read the story of the tower of Babel. Humanity speaks one language, something we also find in ancient Sumerian writings. But they are using this common language to coordinate efforts to build a tower to the heavens. For this arrogance, God confuses the language. And divided by a variety of languages, people scatter to the ends of the earth.

On Pentecost, Jews from all over the known world come together to go to the temple in Jerusalem. They speak a variety of languages. And then God pours out his Spirit on the apostles and they speak in different tongues. Out of the cacophony, people manage to pick out the language they know. They are drawn together by this spectacle. And then Peter preaches the gospel to them.

He probably spoke in Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman empire ever since Alexander the Great. Luke is obviously giving us a summary of a much longer speech. What is interesting is that Peter goes from Joel's prophecy to Jesus as the center of the phenomena the people are witnessing on that Pentecost. And Peter emphasizes Jesus' resurrection. He mentions his death and says it's part of God's plan but he doesn't explain why. Instead he focuses on Jesus rising again. Why? Partly because it is so fresh. Jesus' resurrection was only a month and a half ago. But mostly because it validated who Jesus is: the Messiah, God's anointed King.

What made this Pentecost so effective wasn't the sound of the wind or the tongues of flame or the speaking in tongues. God wasn't interested in giving everyone a magical experience. He was and is interested in redeeming people. He is interested in bringing them into the body of Christ, of uniting them to his son, who is the divine love incarnate, and making them like him. So the focus of the church has to be Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us and is doing in us and how we should respond. The farther we get from that, the more likely we are to go astray.

When the Jews of the diaspora heard the gospel proclaimed on that Pentecost, thousands claimed Jesus as Savior and Lord. They repented and were baptized. And Luke tells us, “They were devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” (Acts 2:42) That's what we do today. We devote ourselves to the teachings of the apostles, found in scripture and summarized in the creeds. We devote ourselves to prayers, new, old and ancient. The first part of our worship service is very much like the synagogue service the apostles were familiar with. We pray, we read the scriptures and someone comments on the passages read.

They also broke bread together. That is probably a reference to the earliest form of what became Communion or the Eucharist. The second part of our worship service is all about our sharing the bread and wine which become for us the body and blood of Jesus, incorporating us into one body, his.

And that brings us to fellowship. The word in Greek, koinonia, means something more than friendship. It's more like partnership. We are partners in Christ, working together to become the kingdom of God.

It all began on Pentecost. And that's why we're celebrating it as a birthday. That's why some churches put up decorations. There's even a kind of correlation between the trappings of modern birthdays and Pentecost.

Birthday parties have candles. The candles in churches symbolize the tongues of flame that came to rest on each of the apostles, the purifying and illuminating energy of the Spirit. Plus God descended to Sinai in fire and spoke to Moses out of fire. The liturgical color of Pentecost is red because of the fire.

The breath used to blow up balloons at parties can represent the Spirit filling us.

At birthday parties we sing traditional songs for the birthday boy or girl. Here too we sing about Christ and his church.

Somebody usually gets up and makes a little speech about the significance of the birthday. That's what I am doing now.

And there is food and drink. Soon we will celebrate the Eucharist, a foretaste of the wedding banquet of the Lamb.

But where are the gifts? The initial gift is the Spirit of God himself. Through him, God not only comes to us, he enters into us. God is no longer someone out there but lives in our hearts and minds and lives.

And the Spirit in turn gives us gifts: wisdom, healing, grace, faith, hope, love and various abilities. Unlike some of the gifts we receive for birthdays, these aren't the kind that you get tired of or which are cool to look at but useless. As it says in 1^st Peter, “Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve another as good stewards of the varied grace of God.” (1 Peter 4:10)

Finally, there is one thing about birthdays that we are especially desirous of when we are young: we want to be older. No child really wants to stay a little kid forever like Peter Pan. We want to grow up and become like our father or mother. We want to be an adult like our older brother. We want to become a man or a woman. Each year is another milestone on the journey of our life. Somewhere along the line we can lose that desire. There's nothing sadder than an adult who refuses to grow up and continues to act like a child. Or an older person trying to hold onto or recapture his or her youth.

We confuse the youth we desire with immaturity and with outward appearances. But what keeps you young inside is not self-indulgence or recklessness or sex or looks but the ability to trust and a sense of wonder. When you lose those, you truly age in the negative sense of that word.

God gives us eternal life. On that scale, we are all still quite young. And so we should still desire to grow, to mature, to see what the next year brings. The church is still young, still making mistakes, still wanting to be popular rather than righteous, wanting to be cool rather than wise. Let our birthday wish, our prayer, be that the church appreciates what it already has and that it wants to grow up to be like its heavenly Father.

First preached on May 23, 2010. It has been updated and revised.

Relying On Jesus

The scriptures referred to are Acts 16:16-34.

Ever ask yourself, “How did we live without cell phones?” Once when I was between jobs, my son told me of an opportunity and I sent an application by email to a coworker of his. Then I went with my wife to her 911 conference, which was held at Disney World. While I was in the park, I got a call from my son who said the person did not yet get my application. Smart phones were new and I had just learned how to check my email on my phone. I saw that I made a slight error in the email address, corrected it and it got to the right person. And it reminded me that when telling computers what to do, you must be exact.

In everyday conversation, however, exact wording is not as important as getting the gist of what is being said. Some people have trouble because they take everything literally. “You said you'd be done in a second and it's been a minute and a half!” For most of us, when someone asks for a second, we don't usually look at our watch and fume if they take more than exactly one second. We know it simply means a very short time.

Exact wording can be important at other times. Mystery writers realize that. In Harry Kemelman's short story The Nine Mile Walk, an English professor, analyzing a sentence a colleague has overheard, uncovers a crime. Similarly in Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation, a surveillance expert also discovers a murder by closely listening to a sentence and realizing the inflection of certain words gives it another meaning.

When it comes to the Bible, usually getting the gist of what it says is sufficient. Otherwise, you could not translate it at all. Some Muslims feel that way about the Quran: unless you read it in the original Arabic, you haven't really read it. But Jesus said the gospel must be preached to all the world and that means in every language. (Matthew 24:14) The Bible has been translated into more than 3000 languages and there are Christians all over the world. (Revelation 7:9) Last week we talked of how you can't capture every nuance of one language in another. But the God who is love is not going to act like some bureaucrat and exclude people who trust and love him because they didn't get everything literally correct. What good is having Jesus and the Spirit as our advocates if our salvation can be undone by a technicality.

Still we should pay attention to what scripture actually says and what it doesn't say. Nowhere does it say that “God helps those who help themselves” That's Ben Franklin. Nor does it say that money is the root of all evil. It does say that “Money is a root of all kinds of evils,” and most modern translations render the Greek properly. (1 Timothy 6:10) Fortunately, there are lots of books and apps that will help you understand passages of the Bible that you may have trouble with. Remember that the word “disciple” means “student.” We are to be students of Jesus, studying his teachings and putting them into practice.

The reason I'm saying this is that there is an interesting word choice in our passage from Acts and I think in this case it is significant.

Paul and Silas have run afoul of the Philippian authorities. They were beaten with rods and thrown into prison. Now it's midnight and they are singing hymns when an earthquake strikes. It causes the crossbars on the doors to fall out of their holders and the prisoners' stocks to come apart. The jailer sees what has happened and pulls out his sword, not to chase fleeing prisoners, but to fall upon it and kill himself. Evidently, his bosses will brook no excuses for losing an inmate, not even acts of God. Paul realizes what the man is about to do. (I'm not sure how he knew this in the dark; perhaps he heard the jailer unsheathe his sword. Or he saw the jailer outside in the moonlight.) Paul shouts loudly for the man to stop. The jailer calls for lights, finds Paul, Silas and the other prisoners together and takes them outside. Then he asks Paul and Silas “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they reply, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.”

Did something sound a bit strange in what Paul and Silas said? They don't tell the man to believe in Jesus but to believe on him. I checked the Greek and sure enough, epi, the Greek preposition for “on,” is used. It's odd because the phrase “believe on Jesus” is rarely used, outside of John. And a lot of translations turn the “on” into “in” here. But I wonder if there isn't a significance in the choice of this preposition. If you are on something, it is holding you up. If you build on something, it becomes your foundation.

The jailer has literally had his livelihood taken out from under him. From what we know of the practices of that time, it was likely that he was a retired soldier. Roman soldiers weren't allowed to marry until they retired. So the children in his household may have been young. He was devastated, just like anyone who survived an earthquake. So when he asks how can he be saved, he probably wasn't thinking about heaven at that moment but saying, as scholar N.T. Wright translates it, “Gentlemen, will you please tell me how can I get out of this mess?”

That's why I think Paul used the preposition epi or “on.” The Greek word for “believe,” pisteuo, means more than just “to think something is true.” It can mean “to rely.” I think what the apostle was telling this poor man who is facing personal and financial disaster, “Rely on the Lord Jesus and you and your family will come through it all.”

There are a lot of people who call themselves Christians in the sense that, yeah, they believe that Jesus came to die for us, to save us, and to tell us that God loves us. But they don't rely on him, at least not in their everyday life. They rely on themselves—their intelligence, their bodily strength and stamina, their good looks, their ability to persuade or manipulate people, their wealth and power, their position, their influential friends and relatives. They rely on their possessions and obsessions to get them through daily life. Jesus is just insurance for when those things fail. He's Plan B. He's there for a rainy day. He's not something they need for ordinary days.

That's the way most people think of doctors. They never go to them when they feel okay, when everything seems to be working just fine. They don't even go to the doctor when they feel bad. They only go when they feel terrible, when they feel that they can't go on with their lives. When they have chest pains and it feels like an elephant is sitting on their chest, they finally call the doctor. And we often treat Jesus, the Great Physician, the same way. We turn to him only when we are in a crisis and need him.

But isn't that what a doctor is for—to treat you when you're sick? Yes, but he can also prevent you from getting sick in the first place. Shouldn't you go to him for that? Shouldn't you let him examine you and tell you if you are doing something unhealthy? Shouldn't you listen to him when he tells you what you should be doing instead? And shouldn't you follow his orders for living a healthy life?

That's what relying on Jesus is like. It's not just going to him when everything is falling apart. It's going to him to help keep it together. It's letting him examine every part of your life, even the embarrassing parts. It's letting him tell you what's wrong. It's listening when he tells you what you ought to do. And then doing it.

In medicine, the current focus on wellness rather than just illness is relatively new. It was not something that was emphasized that much when I entered nursing more than 40 years ago. But in Christianity, it was there all along. Being a Christian was always considered a way of life, a discipline. We were always supposed to be disciples, students and practitioners of this way of life.

Until, that is, modern evangelists shifted the focus to the moment of salvation. Now it is vital to make a decision whether to accept Jesus as Savior or not. For much of history, people growing up in a Christian Western society never consciously made the choice or understood the importance of doing so. But to make that decision and then go your own way is like designating someone to be your doctor on a form and then never actually going to him or following his orders. Some Christians so emphasize the decision to choose Jesus that they neglect the follow up. There was a man in my church who, at every chance he got, talked about the day he was born again. But he never talked about how that affected the rest of his days. It was almost like he was spiritually stillborn.

We have all seen survivors of heart attacks who owe their lives to their doctors and yet go back to the same lifestyle that caused their heart disease. Christians do that at times. We rest in the assurance that our salvation is based on the grace of God and not on our works. But that doesn't mean our works are unimportant. (Ephesians 2:8-10) As God says in Ezekiel 11:19-20, “I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit in them; I will remove the hearts of stone from their bodies and give them tender hearts, so that they may follow my statutes and observe my regulations and carry them out. Then they will be my people and I will be their God.” Again it's like the relationship between a heart doctor and his patient. Only the cardiac surgeon could repair the damaged heart and give the patient a new life. But then the patient is supposed to follow this miracle up by changing his life and following the doctor's orders. If not, the doctor's life-saving feat won't do him much good. He'll become sick again. The goal is to become well, not to set up the next health crisis.

A life of faith is one of constantly relying on Christ. Day by day, we are to follow the Great Physician's orders so that we and our lives might become spiritually healthy, that is, more Christlike. Unfortunately it often takes a crisis to start the process. It took my father-in-law two heart attacks to convince him to change the way he lived his life. He changed how and what he ate, he exercised and he lived for 30 more years, into his 90s.

As for the jailer in our passage, it looks like he got off to a good start. After Paul explains who Jesus is and what he has done for us, the jailer starts acting like Jesus. He dresses the prisoners' wounds, takes them to his home and feeds them. And he and his family are baptized.

We aren't told what happened to the man after that. Was the prison rebuilt? Did the man continue to run it or did he go into something else? It seems likely that Paul introduced the man and his family to the small church that was organizing around the new convert Lydia, whom we read about last week. The man might have been one of the first to hear Paul's letter to the Philippians when it was read in that church. He might have come to see that earthquake as a blessing in disguise: the crisis that brought him to Christ.

Sometimes it takes a disaster, or a meltdown, or an arrest, or an intervention, or an illness to get a person's attention. Sometimes people have to find themselves face to face with their mortality—or their immorality. Sometimes you have to face the ugly truth about yourself before you seek help from Jesus. Sometimes we have to call the spiritual equivalent of 911. Sometimes we need Jesus as our Emergency Room doctor.

But if that's the only time you think about Jesus, if that's the only time you call on him, if that's the only time you seriously consider changing your life, if your prayers are more often “Yikes!” rather than “Thanks!” then you aren't really relying on him. Jesus doesn't want to be that friend you only call when you need to be bailed out. He wants to be the friend who keeps you out of trouble, the one who's there for you every minute of your day, sharing not only your sorrows but also your joys and your journey.

Who is Jesus in your life? Is he just the guy you go to when things go wrong? Or is he the one you follow every day, the one you think of and thank when things go right as well?

Don't wait for your next crisis. Make him part of your daily life. Start and end your day with him. Make him as indispensable as your cell phone and communicate with him as often as you do with others. The difference is you never have to worry about him being busy or out of range or dropping you. No matter how low you battery is or how weak your signal, he'll always get your message. And thanks to the Spirit you don't have to worry about always having the precise words you need to express yourself. (Romans 8:26-27)

And another thing: unlike your phone, he will never become obsolete. And there will be days, I promise you, when you won't know how you lived without him.