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.