What Do You See?

Brian Cavanaugh told the story of a wise old archer that was training two young warriors. Across the meadow was a small target hanging from a tree. The first warrior took an arrow from his quiver, readied it in his bow, and took aim. The teacher asked him to describe everything he saw. He answered, “I see the sky. I see the clouds. I see the trees with their leaves and branches. And I see the target.” “Put your bow down,” said the teacher. “You are not ready yet.”

The second warrior stepped up and readied his bow with an arrow. The teacher told him to describe everything he saw. “I only see the target,” was his reply. “Then shoot,” said the teacher. The arrow flew straight and hit the target. “Very good,” said the teacher. “When you only see the target, your aim will be true, and your arrow will fly according to your wish.”

When you are traveling through the streets of your city or community, what do you see? Do you see alcoholics? Do you see drug addicts? Do you see prostitutes or gang members? Do you see beggars or undesirables? If that is what you see, you are not ready for the work that Jesus commissioned us to do. You will know when you are ready, because when you look around, all you will see are souls.




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The Rich Man And Lazarus

In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus told the story of two men. One of them is a rich man, usually called Dives, which is Latin, for rich. The other man is a beggar named Lazarus.

There are different views on the historicity and origin of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Most theologians believe that this is not a parable that Jesus is telling, but it is a historical account. Supporters of this view point to the amount of detail that is in the story. For example, in no other parable does Jesus use a character’s name, but refers to them as, “a certain man”, “a sower”, etc.

Let us compare the lifestyles of these two individuals. First of all, the Bible says that Dives dressed in purple and fine linen. Wearing purple was associated with kingship. He lived in luxury, enjoying himself by eating sumptuously, meaning he dined on exotic and costly dishes everyday. In most Bible stories, when they mention a gate, they are usually talking about the gate to a city. But Dives was rich enough to have a gate to his house.

This brings us to the second character in the story, Lazarus, because that was where he was laid each day, at the rich man’s gate. The Bible says that Lazarus was happy, just to eat the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table, literary meaning, what he threw away. In Biblical days, there were no napkins or paper towels. Therefore, the rich would use pieces of bread to wipe their hands and fingers, and toss them out of windows along with bones and scraps of food for the dogs. When the parable speaks of dogs, we should not imagine well-groomed, affectionate pedigree dogs. These were semi-wild dogs that roamed the villages and towns eating rubbish and fending for themselves.

Before the age of the welfare state, the diseased and disabled of society were considered to be a burden on others. They were often left sitting or lying at the roadside and in public places asking for charity from passers-by. The description of the dogs licking Lazarus’ sores suggests that he may have been severely disabled, therefore, was unable to protect himself.

Now the story takes a dramatic turn. The Bible says that Lazarus died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died but “in hell he lifted up his eyes”(v23a). I used to wonder why Dives went to hell. Just what had he done that was so terrible? After all, he had not ordered Lazarus to be removed from his gate. He made no objections to his receiving the bread that was flung from his table. And he was never deliberately cruel to Lazarus. So why did Dives go to hell?

The sin of Dives was he accepted him as part of the landscape and thought it was perfectly natural and inevitable that Lazarus should lie in pain and hunger while he wallowed in luxury. So it was not what Dives did that landed him in hell, but what he did not do. The sin of Dives was that he could look on the world’s suffering and need, and feel no grief or pity in his heart. He looked at a fellow human being, hungry and in pain, and did nothing about it. His was the punishment of the man who did nothing.

This parable illustrates a theme that is common to several of Jesus’ parables. The treatment of the least of society is the true measure of piety. We cannot be indifferent to the needs of the poor. External virtue and legal satisfaction cannot compensate for this neglect. Jesus taught repeatedly that the Kingdom of God is within the soul, not in the law.
The parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus makes an important point. It is a warning to the rich and the rest of society about the danger of neglecting the poor.




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Stay In Your Lane

I love watching judge shows on television. Some of my favorites are: Judge Mathis, Judge Judy and Judge Alex. But the show that I like the best is Judge Karen. One of her most popular sayings is, “Stay in your lane.” Sometimes, one of the litigants will get overzealous while presenting his or her case and try to do the judge’s job. When that happens, Judge Karen says, “Stay in your lane. I know what I’m doing.” Judge Karen has a book with the same title, “Stay in your lane.”

Many of us have been guilty of trying to do someone else’s job. It not only happens in the secular world, it happens in many of our churches as well. We try to tell the pastor how to lead his flock. We want to tell the deacons how to minister to the congregation. We attempt to tell the minister of music which songs the choir should sing. We even have the audacity to try to tell God how to get us out of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into.

Our problem is, we want to be in charge of everything. We think we have all of the answers. We don’t want to relinquish control of our lives to anyone. Not even to God. When things don’t go the way we would like, we want to question God. I have seen people blame God for everything from the loss of a loved one, to the loss of a job.

God loves us and He knows what is best for us. We all go through difficult situations sometimes. But we cannot blame God every time things don’t go our way. I must admit, there were times when I was guilty of doing this.

The next time you want to tell God how to do His job, I suggest you read what God said in Job 38:4. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” In other words, “Stay in your lane.”





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Blockers

When I was in the Marines, we formed touch football teams and played during our lunch breaks. The different platoons played against each other. On my team, the quarterback’s name was Freeman. I was the number one receiver. I was a good player and a fast runner. But I had two problems. I dropped the ball a lot, and I didn’t follow my blockers.

Both of those problems stemmed from an incident that happened during one of the games. I had caught a pass and turned to run down the field when I was hit by a player that I did not see coming. I had never been in that much pain in my life. I wanted to cry. But I was a man, a football player and a Marine. After that, whenever a pass was thrown to me, I looked down field to see if I was going to be hit. In other words, I took my eyes off of the ball.
Some of us have been hurt by people or circumstances that we did not expect. As a result, instead of focusing on the task at hand, we took our eyes off of ball. We dropped out of school. We quit our job. We left our spouse. We stopped going to church.

Sometimes Freeman would call a play that was designed for me to get the ball and run to the right. But if I didn’t like the way things looked, I ran to the left instead. The problem was, my blockers, who were my protection, were going to the right. But I thought I was fast enough to make it on my own. So I went in the other direction.
Sometimes God sets up “blockers” to protect us and pave the way for us. The blockers might be our parents, our pastors, or our teachers. But sometimes we don’t like the way things look or what they tell us. So instead of following them, we go it the other direction, thinking we are smart enough to make it on our own.

God has a plan for our lives. We just have to follow His direction, keep our eyes on Him and don’t quit.




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The Line

When I was a teenager, I ran with a Chicago street gang named, “The Roman Saints.” One day, some of us were hanging out on the corner when we spotted several members of a rival gang named, “The Vice Lords.” We started chasing them down Roosevelt Road. I had always been a fast runner. As a matter of fact, I prided myself in being able to outrun most people.

At the time, I was new to the gang and I wanted to impress the guys that I was with. So, while we were chasing the Vice Lords, I decided to show them my speed and ability. Naturally, I was ahead of everyone else. After several blocks, the Vice Lords stopped running. I said to myself, “We got them now.” Then I noticed that they had not only stopped running. They were just standing there, looking at me as if they were waiting for me. When I turned to see where the rest of my gang members were, I got the shock of my life. They were standing on one of the corners, about a block and a half behind me, yelling for me to come back. All of a sudden, the Vice Lords that I had been chasing were chasing me. More of them joined in the chase, cutting off my escape route. I ended up getting one of the worse beat downs in my life. I found out that there was a street that the Saints did not cross. That street was the dividing line between our turf and theirs. If we crossed that line, we were no longer under the cover of the rest of our gang.

Some of the saints of God have crossed the line as well. Some of them were trying to impress other people. Some of them wanted to engage in activities that were ungodly. Some of them just yielded to temptation. Whatever their reasons were, they were no longer under the cover of God’s anointing. Now, some of them are experiencing one of the worse beat downs in their lives. Some of them are in prison. Some of them are strung out on substances. Some of them are in abusive or dangerous relationships. All the while, the rest of the saints are yelling for them to come back.

Have you crossed the line? Are you getting close to it? It’s not too late. Just come back.




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Why We Can’t Wait

“It is the beginning of the year of our Lord, 1963. I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island.

“I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety, wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn’t come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital, the mother might still be alive. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store, where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.”

Those are the opening words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his best-selling book, “Why We Can’t Wait.” He was describing the living conditions of a race of people in 1963. He was trying to tell a group of passive, Christian ministers why it was important to stand up for what was right without delay. A lot of things have changed since then. Unfortunately, too many things remain the same. Children are being murdered on the streets of our cities. War has been declared on our nation’s poor. Hatred is prevalent all across this country. Prisons are bursting at the seams. And all the while, many of our pastors are preaching sermons about, “Bye-and-bye, when the morning comes.”

Jesus told us to “Go.” Not “Wait.” What are we waiting for? This country is full of people who are lost and hurting. Drugs have taken over our communities. Unemployment is at an all time high. Food pantries cannot keep up with the demand. Thousands of families are without gas and electricity because they cannot afford to pay their utility bills. Many of our seniors have to choose between buying food and buying the medicines they need. Children are suffering from sicknesses and diseases, and their families can do nothing about it because they don’t have healthcare. Our boys are being exposed to first-class jails and second-class schools, and if we are not very careful, there will soon be more jails and prisons in this country than there are colleges and universities.

Dr. King ended his introduction with these words: “The boy in Harlem stood up. The girl in Birmingham arose. Separated by stretching miles, both of them squared their shoulders and lifted their eyes toward heaven. Across the miles, they joined hands and took a firm, forward step. It was a step that rocked the richest, most powerful nation to its foundations.”

What about the rest of us? Are we going to stand up and join hands with them? Or are we still waiting for, “That great getting up morning, bye-and-bye?”




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The Game

In my book, The Hoodlum Preacher, I talked about a well-known pimp that operated on the West Side of Chicago. I met him one Saturday afternoon in a barbershop, called Freddy’s. Freddy’s was a place where many of the players got their hair done. It was the 1970s and most of the players were wearing “Super Fly” perms. While sitting in the chair, he talked about the flamboyant lifestyle of players. Because of his reputation and notoriety, everyone in the shop was hanging on his every word.

He said, “There are two kinds of people in this world, the players and the squares. The squares have to get up and go to work everyday because that’s the only way they can make any money. They don’t know how to play the game. They are too busy living their dull, boring lives and trying to stay out of trouble.

‘But us players, we know the game. We drive the baddest rides. We’ve got the prettiest women. We’ve got all the money. And we do whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it.” Then he said, “I don’t know about y’all, but as long as I live, I’m gonna be a player.”

Players are people that live on the edge. They are the pimps, the hustlers, the con artists, the gang bangers, and the drug dealers. They are called players because they play games on people that are designed to separate them from their money and their possessions.

This might sound crazy to some people, but there is something about the danger of living on the edge that is intriguing to people in that lifestyle. Maybe that’s why they call it “The Game.” To the players, it is a game. A very serious one. If you win, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have outsmarted some of the most intelligent people in the world: doctors, lawyers, bankers, judges, policemen, merchants, and even other hustlers. But if you lose, you can lose more than just your money. You can lose your freedom, or even your life. But that’s the game. Everybody can’t play it. But if you chose to try, you’d better be prepared to face the consequences if you lose. And the consequences can be severe.

That lifestyle makes perfectly good sense when you are living outside of the will of God. We cannot see God’s truths because we are blinded by Satan’s lies and his promises of fame and fortune. But God wants us to live abundantly. However, some of us choose to listen to the one who has come to steal, to kill and to destroy. (John 10:10)

Some of players are tired of the way they are living. They are tired of drinking. They are tired of drugging. They are tired of prostituting. They are tired of going to jail. They are tired of playing the game. They want to quit, but they don’t know how. Sin is the game that Satan has tricked them into playing.

Some of our churches have built walls that separate us from the players. It is time to tear down those walls. We have to reach out to the players. They are the ones that Jesus died for. It is time for us to stop playing church, and start being the church.





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