This week I sat down with my father in the faith and asked him about hearing God’s voice for ourselves. As per usual, John was insightful, humble and quotable. I’m honored to share with you, in these series of podcasts, my friend and mentor, John Brown.
This first episode looks at the foundation of our hearing. Is there scriptural precedent for the hearing of faith in contemporary, post-apostolic, times? I appreciate so much what John said in keeping balance with – and providing the safeguard against – the tendency of some to “hear” spurious words and count them as divine.
“The truth is, we cannot knowwhether or not it is God speaking – that is, His speaking ‘in the now’ – without the guidance of what has been written in His Word.”
Does God speak today? Can we know Him intimately with such intimate dialogue as saints of old enjoyed? Thank you for listening to this edition of The Pasture’s Podcast: I pray some of your own questions will be answered on the subject!
(Parts 2 and 3 will be posted on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively, and you DO NOT want to miss them!)
A decade ago (or thereabouts) some brothers met me at the altar of the church I once pastored and prayed for a healing in my life. A saint who pastored me was present on that Sunday morning and suddenly had a ‘word’ he felt compelled to share:
Scott, when your healing comes it won’t be based on your faith but through the faith of others.”
Fast-forward to last month, roughly a decade later.
I was in the throes of one of my most mystifying physical trials in a long history of afflictions, mostly known and often avoidable, the first clues of which manifested the week of Christmas. Starting with sudden – I’ll take care not to overshare here – gastric discomfort then sharp, stabbing pains down my left side, I reckoned I might be joining the ranks of gluten and/or dairy allergy unfortunates and thusly changed my diet posthaste.
Alas, there was near-immediate relief. For a week.
It’s return came with medieval unkindness; there was non-stop nausea, intestinal, ah, belligerence and that infernal left-side pain. After a date night with my beloved I went straight home and to bed. For the next two months I was homebound, bed-ridden and pathetically infirm. Only Sandy and I will ever know the hopeless existence that commenced and emanated from that bedroom. I couldn’t lift a cup to my lips the pain was so great. I could barely tolerate food. Dry-heaving became my frienemy throughout the ordeal. Turn me to change the bed’s draw sheets? Forget it. I couldn’t. Just…couldn’t.
Sandy had to wait on me, hand and foot, week after arduous week, for which she NEVER, EVER complained.
Let’s hear it for the Sange:
Yepsiree…no doubt…
Here’s what you might be thinking (unless you’re still distracted by Ryan Gosling in a tux, ladies):
Boy, Scott, I’ll bet your bedroom was a holy of holies and your bed the mercy seat whereupon you lay suspended between the cherubim, earth and glory. Certainly you floated above us all in rarefied air.
It’d sure be cool to spin my story that way, let me tell you, but most days I felt like I was this guy:
Day turned into night, night labored till dawn, day after day, the same drab and hopeless scene stretched before me, leaving my soul rasping and gasping and bereft. If I lay utterly still the hours were tolerable but woe was me if I had to shift in bed even a few inches. The doctors were befuddled. There were CT scans, ultrasounds, upper endoscopies, colonoscopies, blood and stool tests. Each revealed nothing except mounting bills. Hope hardened and Heaven seemed light years removed. Worship eluded me. I wasn’t mad at God – far, far from it! I don’t believe I even once doubted His goodness. What I did doubt was healing, so began processing what life might look like as a bedridden saint. Frankly, I’d rather I just died.
So, no, no holy place and no ascending incense. I did sense some winged creatures hovering most days, but more in line with:
So, yeah, you get the idea.
However…
Ministering priests began to tromp around on the temple grounds one day in very late February. When Hope seemed bleakest, my priests began stoking the fires, laying the coals of infused incense, offering the breads on the altar, running the oil to the lamp stand, and presented their prayers befor the Lord. Yes, many intercessions had been offered up for me but in one concentrated 24-hr period it was exponential. Texts, voice mails, notes, tweets, direct messages – whatever mediums were available – were laid as my mercy seat upon which the Christ of Comfort took His seat for me, and from which His healing power flowed to my bed of affliction.
There’s a miracle story that Dr. Luke weaves into his gospel tapestry that fits well here.
Seems there was a paralyzed man who needed Jesus’ redemptive touch. He obviously had friends who cared about him for we find their faith in its creative zenith as they Mapquested™ Simon Peter’s address and four-man lifted and carried their disabled friend to his front door in the village of Capernaum. They’d heard Jesus was holding court and believed their friend had a shot if they could only get him near to the Healing Man.
Big obstacle. The house was crowded. Even the overflow rooms were packed. What to do, what to do?
They eyed an outer staircase that led to the roof.
Why not, they thought.
Removing tiles, whether thatch or true tiles, they created an opening just wide enough to lower their buddy to a sliver of space at the feet of the Son of Man. I’m sure Jesus stopped in mid-sermon when He heard the overhead commotion and looked up. I’ll bet a smile widened on His face as the Father revealed His plan to Him in that moment.
“You will heal this man, spirit, soul and body, My Son,” He heard.
Yay! And it’s the Sabbath, and there’s an entourage of Pharisees sitting here! Even better!
(I’m sure Jesus was truly jazzed, because, well, Pharisees…)
Luke is careful to report that Jesus was moved by the faith of this pathetic man’s friends. Just so, I only had a spittle cup’s worth of hope for my own healing, but God blessed me with an army of ministering priests who showed up together and carried me to the mercy-seat of Jesus, believing as one that there was Gospel Hope for me.
Within 24 hours of this prayer barrage,I had no more debilitating pain.
I could turn myself.
I could bathe myself.
I could dress myself.
No doctors, no medicine, no therapy.
This miracle is solely attributable to Jehovah-Rapha, my Healer.
A friend recently asked me about that decade-ago exchange, about my healing coming based on the faith of others not my own. She asked if I thought this was that. I don’t know, quite honestly. If it isn’t, it’s enough. More than! Whatever God decides, I’m at peace with it. But somehow I believe an even greater healing is coming. Henceforth, I’m waiting for some friends to call me someday and say:
Each and every evening, Sandy prayed over her baby boy – even into his young adult years – the words “Sleep sweet in Jesus…”
Night was never Gra-Gra’s favorite time; he didn’t sleep through the night until he was 11 years old! These were his most vulnerable hours, those pre-‘nighty-night’ moments.
I can still hear Sandy call out in her same sing-songy way, “Gra-Gra, time to go night-night!” and our little man reply, “I don’t want to, mommy.” But then, knowing he so disliked the night, would help him ease into it by indulging their sweet ritual.
For many years, they shared this mommy-and-son time; incidentally, it is when Graham often opened up about the things that either bothered or mattered to him. Sandy would climb into bed with her beautiful baby boy (at whatever age) and listen to his dreams, fears, burdens, day’s recaps and tomorrow’s plans.
We didn’t know it as we drove away from Erlanger with our new baby, but a night was coming to us, so dark and dreadful. How we needed our Father to climb into our bed with us and tell us it was okay to close our eyes and sleep, that he was keeping watch over our souls.
Ernst
Before we could take our baby boy across the state line from Tennessee into Georgia we had to get permission from child services in our state. Because the little guy came early we weren’t able to get the requisite home visit in time. We had to scramble to get it done and make sure every duck was corralled and every T crossed to go from Point A to Point B. The next twenty-fours hours from hospital hand-off to home would require some pretty fancy footwork.
The game plan was to leave our son with Sandy’s sister in Chattanooga while we raced the two hours in time for an afternoon home visit with our very by-the-book no-nonsense child services officer, Ernst Bierkerut. Yeah, whatever you’re picturing in your head, that’s him. Imagine our glee, when after a grueling two-and-a-half-hour session, Mr. Bierkerut was finally, mildly, unenthusiastically, somewhat okay with our home being borderline acceptable.
“You may go get your son,” he deadpanned.
We, on the other hand, danced like little schoolkids and cried happy tears to the heavens. Ernst may have even slightly smiled.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. – Job
Friday, September 29, 1989 Chattanooga, TN
Eight years earlier, I face-planted into the thin smelly carpet of my dorm room and told the Lord I was done with living life on my terms and behaving like a libertine when I was away from my Christian college’s campus. The hypocrisy is over. The rebellion ends here and now. Whatever it takes. Whatever I need to surrender.
Now, eight years later, on the exact day and in the very same city, I have a son. It’s not lost on me that, one, dates are important to God within the sphere of human events, and, two, though I lost something valuable (my legs), I gained something infinitely better: fatherhood.
The Lord gives, takes away, and gives much more in its place.
Eight years. Eight, as I understand Hebrew numerology, relates to new beginnings. Sandy and I had come to the end of our season of longing and pleading, despair and dashed hopes. God came through, as he does. The heavenlies had shifted and a new day had come for this childless couple.
Ernst gave his permission, as if he could stop anything God ordained, and we were off to Chatt-town to get our boy.
We roared into town, throwing the car into park in the driveway. The small house was packed with loved ones, all celebrating this next mile of our journey with us. A quick supper, we were saying our good-byes in the dining room when a family member came around the corner from the living room. His face was white as a sheet.
“He’s not breathing.”
Three harrowing words. In a simple turn of phrase our world suddenly started splitting at the seams. Little peanut Graham was still as a stone in his carrier, head lolling to the side. Frantic, we dialed the emergency line at the Children’s Hospital and, after describing the symptoms, were told to get him there as fast as possible.
Sandy’s mom climbed into the back seat with our newborn and we beat a path to the same hospital where his life began, a twenty-minute drive away. We caught nearly every red light en route and were at one infuriating moment stopped by a slow-moving train. My mother-in-law tried to keep us calm by saying Gra-Gra was fine, still faintly breathing. “But hurry.” [Later she told us she was frightened because nothing she tried brought any kind of response. At one point, she was convinced he was gone. ]
By the mercies of God, we arrived at Erlanger and a waiting team of responders literally wrenched our son away and rushed him behind large steel doors, disappearing from view, our tiny bundle lost amid a blur of scrubs and white.
Our next moments dragged by until a doctor came out to us and said he’s alive, just barely, the preliminary tests show some kind of infection, perhaps even meningitis, they would need to do a spinal tap ASAP, do we give our permission…wait here until we finish…
Seemed to us that Death was doing all the swallowing this time……
A nurse told us the tap had been performed and they were waiting for the results. “Would you like to see your baby?” she asked us. We were directed to a room closed off by a wall of glass for viewing. A tiny, naked little body, just a stub of a tiny person, was stretched out on a metal table, electrodes, lines and tubes somehow draped in, on, and around him. A small bandage covered his lower back, covering the spot where they drained some spinal fluid. Sandy reached for her mouth. We both silently wept.
Dear God…our little boy…
We never left the hospital. The ICU waiting room was our bunker and the first night as our newborn son’s legally recognized guardians was the longest of our lives. Sometime during the night, I needed to find a secluded spot and found an alcove nearby where I could cry out to God for answers.
“Father,” I pled, “what is this? Why, God? Why?” Silence. “I don’t understand,” I continued. “Will my son live?”
More silence. Impregnable silence.
“Please, oh God…please…we need a miracle here…tonight…ohjesusohjesusohjesus…please…help…”
I’ve never heard the audible voice of God, but I’ve come close and the closest I’ve ever come was in those next few seconds as I waited for news – any news – from the Great Physician. I am most certain He said:
Your son will not die, but live. I have a purpose for Graham’s life; Satan knows it and wants him dead. Rest now, I will not let that happen…
He did recover. Results for meningitis returned negative. Evidently, he had contracted a bug during the birth process and his tiny body had to learn to fight it off. He was meant to live.
He spent eight days in the hospital and we never left his side. Eight days. There it is again. The number eight. Perhaps I’m reading far too much into it, but please allow me this. It’s not a panacea but a signpost that God was near, he was with the three of us, and Death was being swallowed up in his victory.
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