Dear Friends,
This is the fourth message in a series on the milestones in my spiritual life. These are my testimonies of the difference that Jesus Christ has made in my life. My hope is you will be stirred to seek Christ for yourself or to renew your relationship with him.
This week’s message is one I have shared before multiple times in the pulpit, at retreats and conferences, and on-line. I do not apologize for the repetition. It is the story of the turning point, twenty-six years ago, when the Lord led me to repentance. An obvious question is why was repentance needed for a son of devout Christian parents, enrolled in Christian schools for seventeen of my twenty years of formal education, husband of a Christian spouse, administrator of a Christian university, legal counsel to churches and Christian institutions?
The answer is equally obvious, but most often its truth is denied or evaded–the life of Jesus Christ is fresh and new. It arrives as gift of love to willing recipients. Because this gift of life is Christ himself possessing the mind, soul and body of the humans who accept it, DNA, family and social relationships, religious and occupational performance or failure, and material advantage nor disadvantage can neither qualify or disqualify one from receiving it.
The most our human relationships and activities can do for us in this regard is to stir our hunger for the bread and water of life who is Jesus (John 6:35; 7:37-38). But only Jesus can satisfy that hunger. Everything and everyone else is unequal to our need and the demands of eternity.
The danger is that success and virtue in our human relationships and activities can deceive us into thinking we can be God for ourselves (Gen 3:1-7). We have a Creator who loves us and is willing to supply us if only we look to him for everything. Instead, we say with pride, “Thank you, very much, it was nice of you to give me life, but I will take it from here and show you what I can do and just how good I can be.”
Our Creator God is gracious and allows us to go our way, but we start running into problems. As created beings, we lack God’s creative powers. We have to work with the material resources that we already have, because without God there aren’t going be any more.
So we work, save, organize, arrange and buy and sell our finite resources in the predicable rhythms of supply and demand. We applaud the successes of those who lead us in this effort we call business and try to emulate them. But as supplies are used up or hoarded by the powerful, the demands become fueled by envy, greed, anger and escalate into violence. Our disputes, conflicts and wars all originate in human cravings and without a reliance on Divine Providence it will always be so (Js 4:1-7).
We expend our intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual strength in pursuit of mastery and the vain hope of security. Try as we might, we cannot bridge the gulf between the God who loves us and the things we love in place of God.
It is my personal experience that when that gulf widens into a seemingly impossible abyss, the person facing it has reached the critical decision point between eternal life and death. Either one plunges on into the dark void of human existence beyond human capability or else drops to one’s knees in the light of reality and says, “I’m done.I will arise and go to the house of my Father” (cf, Luke 15:18).
Twenty-five years ago this fall, I was a busy young attorney on the rise–managing partner of my law firm, civic leader, father of a precocious two-year- old son, restoring an old home with my spouse. This was the stuff of the American dream.
But there was a sinkhole underneath. For one thing I was totally consumed with work, oblivious to everything else. For another, I was spiritually bankrupt. I represented a Christian denomination and its flagship University, my alma mater. But the institution was in a civil war over its future and as its legal counsel I was right in the middle. Religion was a business to me and it was bad business.
There were warning signs of problems. Flare-ups of anger. Tears of unnamed sadness while driving from appointment to appointment.
A client invited me to dinner on an August evening in 1989. She was a well-known Christian marriage and family counselor with a seven figure practice built on referrals from her radio show and books. She was a woman of prayer with great beauty and presence even with a body ravaged by the colon cancer. She would die just two months later. When she expressed an urgency to meet with me, I thought it was about some legal problem she wanted to wrap up.
Kathleen was in obvious pain as we sat down to dinner. She graciously told me about her last trip to the Holy Land to work with Palestinian and Jewish victims of violence. Then she began to probe me with questions about my work and interests. Finally she said, “Kent, the Holy Spirit has impressed me that you have no idea of what God thinks about you or what he wants from you. You keep trying to prove your worthiness, but everything you are doing drives you further away from him. It is you he wants and He is all you need. You will never be happy until you accept this. I could not rest without telling you this.
I cried driving home afterwards. Then I stuffed those feelings away with all the others I’d sort out when I had time and inclination.
The first week of October, I traveled across the country for a meeting at church headquarters. On the way out the door leaving home, I picked up a book to read on the plane. My first pick was a novel. Something in me said, “no.” The next book in the pile was a book my brother had told me about. I thought it was a time-management book. The title was Ordering Your Private World, by Gordon MacDonald (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1985). I’d ordered it through a secular book store in town. Settling in on the plane, I was surprised to find it was a Christian book.
MacDonald’s premise is that each of us has an inner-world of the heart and soul where our true calling is received and our purpose formed. Our basic decisions about motives, values and commitments are made there. This place where we sort out our thinking, emotions, and actions in communion with God has five sectors–motivation, time, intellectual growth, spirit, and Sabbath peace. If these sectors are properly centered in Christ and developed by study and reflection on Scripture, prayer, and habits of devotion and obedience, our outer world of relationships will also be healthy. If this inner world is not ordered we can disintegrate in stress and dysfunction.
MacDonald contrasts the drivenness of King Saul of Israel with the calling of John the Baptist. This drivenness can trap us in a high-maintenance golden cage of success and leave us spiritually drained leading to a disastrous spiritual and moral collapse. I hadn’t gone through many pages before I thought, “He’s talking about me.” I read on with a mixture of curiosity and dread.
When I reached the hotel in Maryland, I watched the end of the baseball playoffs out on the west coast, and read some more. The next morning, I read, and then thought “I should pray.” There was a problem. Life-long, professed Christian that I was, graduate of Christian schools, son of praying, Christian parents–I couldn’t pray. I mean, what do you say to God when you aren’t trying to pass a test, win a case, make a deal? I paced the room in growing frustration–I couldn’t pray. Finally, I blurted out something incoherent to the effect, of “God, I’d like to talk to you but I don’t know how.”
The day was filled with business, but once again no resolution was found for the institutional conflict. The next morning began the same way with my reading and struggle to pray. Then I left the hotel for the flight home. In Chicago I changed planes. At 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon, on Thursday, October 4, just after take off from O’Hare International Airport, I read a prayer that MacDonald quotes from an old Salvation Army evangelist, Samuel Logan Brengle:
Keep me, O Lord, from waxing mentally and spiritually dull and stupid. Help me to keep the physical, mental, and spiritual fibre of the athlete, of the man who denies himself daily and takes up his cross and follows Thee. Give me good success in my work, but hide pride from me. Save me from the self-complacency that so frequently accompanies success and prosperity. Save me from the spirit of sloth, of self-indulgence, as physical infirmities and decay creep upon me” (p 151).
I was in the window seat. The plane was still on its ascent. When I finished this prayer, I heard a distinct, audible voice, and God said to me: “You are convicted of sin.” I had no doubt it was God though I hadn’t heard from him since my experience in the dorm room, I wrote about two messages ago. The truth and power of the words spoke with an undeniable clarity.
I dropped my head and asked, “What’s my sin, God?
He said, “Your pride and busyness have choked me out of your life and are killing your relationship with your family. Don’t you think I can take care of the University and everything else you’re concerned about? Trust me.”
That was all there was, but it was overwhelming. God’s presence affected me physically. I squirmed in my seat, heart racing. For months afterwards, I felt tender and raw, like I had been burned out inside. Setting the book aside, I stared out the window, stunned. This was real and overpowering. All I could do was yield to the presence of a God who had just run me over with the big Mack truck of grace.
When we landed in Ontario, I knew I had to tell my wife, Patricia, what had happened. When I drove in the driveway, she came out to meet me. “We need to go pick up Andrew at the baby sitter’s,” she said.
“OK. But first I have to tell you something.”
“Is everything, OK,” she asked.
“Well, yes and no.”
We sat down in the living room. I told her what had happened. Then I said,”Every bit of talent that God has given me for leadership and organization, I have squandered. I do all these things and then, if that wasn’t enough, I start new organizations. I don’t ask God if I should do any of these things.”
“I come home late, and eat supper and play with Andrew a while. Then I go upstairs and shut the door and work past midnight, night after night. No one else in the firm does that. I just do it to show I can do all this stuff and more. I come in after you are asleep and I am up and out before you are awake.”
“You’re ill and are fighting the loss of your eyesight. When you’re angry and upset about it, I just ‘shine you on,’and say ‘don’t dump this on me.'”
I looked at her and said, “I have been so selfish, and I am sorry, so sorry that I am sick in my bones. Things are going to have to be different. It would help if you were in this with me.”
Patricia looked at me a while. She said, “Things have been out of control for a long time. We have gone from a great marriage to an ordinary marriage. I want this too.”
We bowed our heads and prayed together. We went and picked up our son.
The differences were immediate and lasting. I developed an enormous appetite for the Word of God that has never left me. God left nothing in our lives unturned. I quit eight board and committee memberships in a day a few months later. My life became centered in Christ and the quiet time I spend in study and prayer with Him every morning and night. I’ve learned that Paul’s instruction to “pray without ceasing” means looking for God in every circumstance and situation” (2 Thess 5:17).
Many among my co-workers and clients since then have accepted Christ or renewed a relationship with him. It all happened quietly without proselytizing. Prayer, encouragement and the witness of a changed life have power.
God changed my life not in a pew or a classroom. He changed it in the real world where I love my wife, play with my son, make deals, argue cases and write contracts. I will tell you now after the devastation of grace that I continue to grow in assurance about God and my trust deepens. Yet, I am less sure of everything else. Every turn in the road, God has become greater and the firm grip of his love tightens on my life. Everything else continues to fade.
He continues to change me. For quite a while I begged him to leave some parts of me alone because they seemed to be good, but I learned he replaces our life entirely with his (Gal 2:19-20; Col 3:3-4). He does not repair or remodel us.
The resurrected life of Jesus Christ is everything for us. Until we accept this and give up on our lives, even what we consider to be to our best attributes and traits, the restless hungering for more plaguing our souls will never be stilled. This is something you have to find out for yourself. I have taken you as far as I can.
If you don’t know how to reach him, a simple prayer, like “God, I’d like to talk to you, but I don’t know how” is a good place to start. Pray the prayer with honesty. Then wait and listen. He makes a promise, “When you call upon me, and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart. I will let you find me, says the Lord. . .” (Jer 29:12-14a). Believe him!
“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps. 34:8).
Under the mercy of Christ,
Kent
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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.
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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.
Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.