School of Theology

Yesterday morning I participated for the second year in a row in Calvary Chapel South Bay's Easter Sunrise Service.  Pastor Steve Mays has become a good friend and I have come to love the pastors, support staff, and congregation of this great church.  So it's always a pleasure to be with them.

They hold their Sunrise service in the Home Depot Tennis Stadium as Cal State Dominguez Hills.  It's a great setting.  The Stadium fills up.  Pastor Kevin is a great worship leader, skillfully leading the congregation in focusing on God.  His band is always very good, setting the stage with excellence, but never getting in the way.  Then Pastor Steve Mays does the Calvary thing.  He preaches straighforward, clear messages from the Bible text.

People respond.

Yesterday was no different.  Pastor Steve preached a message of hope from an Easter text.  He told the audience about the real power of faith in Jesus to change our lives, to change our hearts, to give us peace and confidence in this bewildering world.

At the end of the service he gave a simple invitation to those who wanted to know Jesus personally.  Scores of people came forward.  The oldest was an Asian woman who had to be in her eighties.  Several children, and men and women of all ages and ethnicities, came as well.  Many had tears in their eyes.  They came with a a mixture of anticipation, determination, and hope on their faces.

I've been reminded of something important.

Christians have, so often in our history, been people driven by the urge to fix -- fix the world, fix other people, fix ourselves.  In the process we so often destroy.

It isn't as though there isn't a lot that needs to be fixed.  We live in a broken world, after all.

But our good intentions turn destructive because we are not wise enough to foresee the hidden consequences of our interventions.  We destroy because we do not, cannot, truly understand. 

Our urge to fix turns destructive, I think, because we forget that we human beings live out of our hearts.  Hearts cannot be fixed.  They must be healed.

And hearts can only be healed when they fall in love.

As I've reflected on yesterday's beautiful scene of earnest, ordinary people walking toward a relationship with Jesus, I've been reminded of what Jesus told us to do for him.

He didn't say, "Go fix my broken world."  He said, "Go call people to follow me.  Help people fall in love with me so that, despite themselves, they will learn to live my kind of life in the world."

I saw that happen again yesterday morning.  It was an exercise in hope.