Finding God: the Search with the Whole Heart and the Magic of the Kerygma
C. H. Dodd made it clear in The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers; 1964) that the kerygma was intentional. It was designed, chosen. It did not come up by happenstance: it pleased God (1 Corinthians 1:21). Why did it please God? Because it got men saved. How did the kerygma get men saved? It made them seek God with their whole heart, which changed their brain chemicals, hence their brains, and then He could deal with them. The kerygma is the way He does it.
That is pretty simple, isn't it? God got salvation ready, then made men want it and able to get it by the kerygma. The kerygma makes you feel terrible. Terrified, actually. It scares you. Stresses you. You want to escape, to change what you are--to cast yourself out of yourself, and the only way you find relief is to repent--to end "you"--and cast yourself upon God's mercy. The stress, anxiety, and flight mode releases hormones in the brain. These sharply up the brain's acuity, the mental hearing, and opens the mind to reception of the Voice and the Holy Spirit. Desperation is a wonderful thing.
The first time I saw the effects of the kerygma was at the House of Praise in Kaimuki, Hawaii. It was a Friday night Bible study, and the teacher asked if anyone wanted to be saved. To tell you the truth, as he preached about how Jesus had given his life for ours, I had been mentally justifying my conclusion that Jesus was and is the son of God and convincing myself to go forward when the altar call came. I wasn't really listening. My mother's best friend was sitting right next to me encouraging me, as she had gone forward about two weeks earlier. I did get up and prayed the sinner's prayer with the teacher, Rod Wilson, but only felt good about having done so.
The House of Praise was a private home on Center Street, right behind the Kress store, and the study was held in the living room. We sat in whatever chairs and sofas were available, or on the floor. To the side of the lectern that night was a young man splayed across a white overstuffed chair. He looked for all the world as disinterestedly distant as one could be. Rod looked straight at him, kind of visually buttonholing him, and said, "What about you? Do you want to be saved (or something to that effect)? The guy's expression changed to overwhelming grief. "Yes," was all he said as he slid out of the chair. He broke down in the saddest, most heartbroken sobs I have ever heard; and then, raising his hands with tears still streaming down his face, tongues! THAT was the kerygma in action. What a remarkable one-eighty I witnessed. I knew my feeling good about going forward was real, but it didn't compare with that guy's experience. What was I to do? I had believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, that all the Bible was true, and that the world really was the way the Bible says it is. It was still distant to me, though. What had I missed?
A few Sundays later I went with a friend to Grace Bible Church. Their choir performed some Bill Gaither testimony about When I Met Jesus, or something like that. My friend stayed after the service, and with their ministers retired to the fellowship center to pray for the gift of tongues. I waited patiently in the vestibule until one of the ministers asked me if I wanted to ask for the gift, too. Oh, why not? Still wasn't listening.
Kneeling before an aisle of folding chairs with their hands on me, I gave my voice and my lips to Jesus to use to praise God by the Holy Spirit. Nothing. So I gave God more and more of me until I ran out of everything present and future. Nothing. God wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole. I was rejected. Desperation rose within me. I believed the Bible. I had been with Holy Spirit filled, tongue speaking saints. That way wasn't the way I was going. I experienced fear and dread. I sobbed like the guy at the House of Praise, searching for a way. I was with these ministers--where else could I go to find out why I was rejected? I was in prayer. I asked God. I was focused like a laser beam on LISTENING TO WHAT HE MIGHT SAY.
I asked in stress. All my heart was in it. What had I done? What had I not done? What could I do or undo to make myself acceptable? All my insides were reaching out for relief, for a path to follow. I slid into a trance like the guy at the House of Praise had slid out of that chair. In my mind, I was in a wash, the dry riverbed of a stream or creek. I was following a long path going upstream through the brush. I should mention that I recognized this wash. It was between Avocado Heights and the Puente hills, where I had played and explored during my junior and senior high school years in La Puente, California. As I followed the path upstream, I noticed concrete walls rising along the sides. It became a man-made wash. The path came to a huge, gray block of concrete which blocked a gap in the wall I had to go through. I leapt up trying to catch its edge to pull myself over. I couldn't reach high enough. Unable to scale the block, I searched for a way around. No way. I thought of backtracking down the wash to go around the wall. No, the path didn't go past the wall; it went down, and the block was right over the hole or passage down.
I was stymied and became increasingly desperate about this block. I knew it was the unknown thing blocking me from becoming acceptable to God. I had to surrender it to Him somehow, but I couldn't give what I didn't know what was. I searched all over the block for a name. It must be identified somehow, somewhere. No, it simply was what it was. It blocked me from being acceptable to God, and would simply have to be given whole--whatever it was.
The stress was dizzying. Give up what I don't know what it is? There was a real threat there. I really didn't know what it was, and giving it was a commitment. What if it was something I had to do that I really did not want to do? What if it was an unacceptable loss or embarrassment? I did not want to vow a vow to God--Who was real and present--that I did not want to pay. But the only way for me to find God was to give it. So in utter desperation and surrender I said, "I do not know what it is, Lord, but whatever it is, I give it to you."
Suddenly, in my perspective I was below the block in an underground chamber. Oddly, the surface of the earth stretched out before me to the horizon. The soil was wet, and a scoop of it was lifted up and formed into a man. A mud-man, with all the components and organs of a man, but not living. And then life was given to it. "He" lived, was animated, and looked out across the surface of the earth. I wondered what this freshly created being thought, never having seen or thought anything before. "This is earth," it thought. "That's the sky with its sun, and this is the ground. The sun will set, and it will get cold. I had better find shelter in the hills over there."
I--my perspective, anyway--followed the mud-man, watching from behind. He was all new. "What is he thinking? What he is seeing? What is his response?" I wondered. Then I saw through his eyes. I heard his thoughts as my thoughts. With only the slightest awareness that I was observing, I became as him inside his brain.
To make a long story short, I got caught up in "my"--the mud-man's--personal concerns. Where is a good cave? Is it safe to approach a cave? Can I make a defendable shelter among the trees? How would I do that? I have got to hurry. I will need to make a fire. Should I gather firewood while I search for a cave? I will be hungry. How do I know what I can eat? Should I eat now, or plant seed for food to exist later? My mind was focused on all the things I had to do in life.
It hit me suddenly, with clarity I did not know was possible: I saw that I had got caught up in running a life that wasn't mine. My only concern ever in my life had been for "me." I did what I wanted to do. I dictated my life, but this was God's life. In His grace God had animated me by His spirit. Mistaking my living for being an independent "me," I had taken over and had absconded with God's life. I had robbed Him. I was a thief. I had used God's life as my own and had deprived Him of whatever purpose He created me for. He must have intended some use of me when He formed me and animated me by His spirit. Yet I had gone off doing whatever I thought needed to be done for my purposes. I had never acknowledged God for making me; I had never said, "Thank you." Not once in my life had I stopped to ask Him, "What did you make me for? What do You want me to do?"
Did I mention terror? It washed over me like a tidal wave. I was kneeling before the Judge of the Earth--God Most High--Mano y mano as we gringos say. And it didn't look good for me. For I had counted myself God's peer. I had "given" myself to Him as one gives a loan to an equal. If I did not like what He did with me, I was going to take myself back: "Forget it, God. The deal is off." I counted myself to be independent of God: a separate, free entity. In my ignorance I exercised self-lordship. I directed everything.
I smelled the stench all this must have been in God's nostrils. Repulsion. No wonder He wouldn't touch me: a rebel, a thief, an ingrate--self-controlled and thinking myself independent. I was a God rejector. No honor for God. No love. No appreciation. And I wanted GIFTS? I had to be out of my mind!
In utter panic I felt for a resolve. How do I undo my self-control? Jesus had taken my sin. Cool. All I could do now was to present myself to God again, afresh to fulfill whatever purpose He might still have for me. Sloughing off the fear that I might just fall down on the floor as a blob, I cast self-control out of myself. I did not fall, but felt myself caught. I had found submission of my self to God. Whole submission. My old life was done away with, and with no exercise of control on my part, I simply waited for whatever God might direct me to do. And boy, was I listening.
In my mind, I knelt at a large, felled pine in a high clearing surrounded by mountains. Though my head was bowed, I perceived the sky and the clouds above my head turning a rosy red with the approach of God's Glory. The Big Guy was there. I said, "You are Glorious God. I am a mud-man. Whatever you want me to do, that I will do." Then I shut up, and I waited.
What had been preached to me by God was the kerygma in His own words. I was deeply involved with it this time. It caused me to search for God with my whole heart. Its stresses produced chemicals in my brain which helped my brain to hear Him. It put me in my place; got me to the point where I could fully surrender and submit to Him. A short while after I did, He said in the softest of voices, "Remember this, and it is all right." I was forgiven. Accepted. Ecstatic, my bowel area filled with the sensation of rising, living water. The sensation rose up to my throat area, and my mouth began to move on its own. "Don't try to control it," the minister next to me said. (Good God! He was still there? In must have been the middle of the night.) The kerygma had flowed around from rejection and guilt to surrender, acceptance, and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. Praise and adoration flowed from my lips in a tongue I simply observed. The energy moving my lips and forming the words was not mine, but the emotions were.
So there is a magic in the kerygma. Maybe the closest thing we can commonly come to real magic: a dead, lost soul is quickened to spiritual life again--the best trick in the world. I hope you are listening.
That is pretty simple, isn't it? God got salvation ready, then made men want it and able to get it by the kerygma. The kerygma makes you feel terrible. Terrified, actually. It scares you. Stresses you. You want to escape, to change what you are--to cast yourself out of yourself, and the only way you find relief is to repent--to end "you"--and cast yourself upon God's mercy. The stress, anxiety, and flight mode releases hormones in the brain. These sharply up the brain's acuity, the mental hearing, and opens the mind to reception of the Voice and the Holy Spirit. Desperation is a wonderful thing.
The first time I saw the effects of the kerygma was at the House of Praise in Kaimuki, Hawaii. It was a Friday night Bible study, and the teacher asked if anyone wanted to be saved. To tell you the truth, as he preached about how Jesus had given his life for ours, I had been mentally justifying my conclusion that Jesus was and is the son of God and convincing myself to go forward when the altar call came. I wasn't really listening. My mother's best friend was sitting right next to me encouraging me, as she had gone forward about two weeks earlier. I did get up and prayed the sinner's prayer with the teacher, Rod Wilson, but only felt good about having done so.
The House of Praise was a private home on Center Street, right behind the Kress store, and the study was held in the living room. We sat in whatever chairs and sofas were available, or on the floor. To the side of the lectern that night was a young man splayed across a white overstuffed chair. He looked for all the world as disinterestedly distant as one could be. Rod looked straight at him, kind of visually buttonholing him, and said, "What about you? Do you want to be saved (or something to that effect)? The guy's expression changed to overwhelming grief. "Yes," was all he said as he slid out of the chair. He broke down in the saddest, most heartbroken sobs I have ever heard; and then, raising his hands with tears still streaming down his face, tongues! THAT was the kerygma in action. What a remarkable one-eighty I witnessed. I knew my feeling good about going forward was real, but it didn't compare with that guy's experience. What was I to do? I had believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, that all the Bible was true, and that the world really was the way the Bible says it is. It was still distant to me, though. What had I missed?
A few Sundays later I went with a friend to Grace Bible Church. Their choir performed some Bill Gaither testimony about When I Met Jesus, or something like that. My friend stayed after the service, and with their ministers retired to the fellowship center to pray for the gift of tongues. I waited patiently in the vestibule until one of the ministers asked me if I wanted to ask for the gift, too. Oh, why not? Still wasn't listening.
Kneeling before an aisle of folding chairs with their hands on me, I gave my voice and my lips to Jesus to use to praise God by the Holy Spirit. Nothing. So I gave God more and more of me until I ran out of everything present and future. Nothing. God wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole. I was rejected. Desperation rose within me. I believed the Bible. I had been with Holy Spirit filled, tongue speaking saints. That way wasn't the way I was going. I experienced fear and dread. I sobbed like the guy at the House of Praise, searching for a way. I was with these ministers--where else could I go to find out why I was rejected? I was in prayer. I asked God. I was focused like a laser beam on LISTENING TO WHAT HE MIGHT SAY.
I asked in stress. All my heart was in it. What had I done? What had I not done? What could I do or undo to make myself acceptable? All my insides were reaching out for relief, for a path to follow. I slid into a trance like the guy at the House of Praise had slid out of that chair. In my mind, I was in a wash, the dry riverbed of a stream or creek. I was following a long path going upstream through the brush. I should mention that I recognized this wash. It was between Avocado Heights and the Puente hills, where I had played and explored during my junior and senior high school years in La Puente, California. As I followed the path upstream, I noticed concrete walls rising along the sides. It became a man-made wash. The path came to a huge, gray block of concrete which blocked a gap in the wall I had to go through. I leapt up trying to catch its edge to pull myself over. I couldn't reach high enough. Unable to scale the block, I searched for a way around. No way. I thought of backtracking down the wash to go around the wall. No, the path didn't go past the wall; it went down, and the block was right over the hole or passage down.
I was stymied and became increasingly desperate about this block. I knew it was the unknown thing blocking me from becoming acceptable to God. I had to surrender it to Him somehow, but I couldn't give what I didn't know what was. I searched all over the block for a name. It must be identified somehow, somewhere. No, it simply was what it was. It blocked me from being acceptable to God, and would simply have to be given whole--whatever it was.
The stress was dizzying. Give up what I don't know what it is? There was a real threat there. I really didn't know what it was, and giving it was a commitment. What if it was something I had to do that I really did not want to do? What if it was an unacceptable loss or embarrassment? I did not want to vow a vow to God--Who was real and present--that I did not want to pay. But the only way for me to find God was to give it. So in utter desperation and surrender I said, "I do not know what it is, Lord, but whatever it is, I give it to you."
Suddenly, in my perspective I was below the block in an underground chamber. Oddly, the surface of the earth stretched out before me to the horizon. The soil was wet, and a scoop of it was lifted up and formed into a man. A mud-man, with all the components and organs of a man, but not living. And then life was given to it. "He" lived, was animated, and looked out across the surface of the earth. I wondered what this freshly created being thought, never having seen or thought anything before. "This is earth," it thought. "That's the sky with its sun, and this is the ground. The sun will set, and it will get cold. I had better find shelter in the hills over there."
I--my perspective, anyway--followed the mud-man, watching from behind. He was all new. "What is he thinking? What he is seeing? What is his response?" I wondered. Then I saw through his eyes. I heard his thoughts as my thoughts. With only the slightest awareness that I was observing, I became as him inside his brain.
To make a long story short, I got caught up in "my"--the mud-man's--personal concerns. Where is a good cave? Is it safe to approach a cave? Can I make a defendable shelter among the trees? How would I do that? I have got to hurry. I will need to make a fire. Should I gather firewood while I search for a cave? I will be hungry. How do I know what I can eat? Should I eat now, or plant seed for food to exist later? My mind was focused on all the things I had to do in life.
It hit me suddenly, with clarity I did not know was possible: I saw that I had got caught up in running a life that wasn't mine. My only concern ever in my life had been for "me." I did what I wanted to do. I dictated my life, but this was God's life. In His grace God had animated me by His spirit. Mistaking my living for being an independent "me," I had taken over and had absconded with God's life. I had robbed Him. I was a thief. I had used God's life as my own and had deprived Him of whatever purpose He created me for. He must have intended some use of me when He formed me and animated me by His spirit. Yet I had gone off doing whatever I thought needed to be done for my purposes. I had never acknowledged God for making me; I had never said, "Thank you." Not once in my life had I stopped to ask Him, "What did you make me for? What do You want me to do?"
Did I mention terror? It washed over me like a tidal wave. I was kneeling before the Judge of the Earth--God Most High--Mano y mano as we gringos say. And it didn't look good for me. For I had counted myself God's peer. I had "given" myself to Him as one gives a loan to an equal. If I did not like what He did with me, I was going to take myself back: "Forget it, God. The deal is off." I counted myself to be independent of God: a separate, free entity. In my ignorance I exercised self-lordship. I directed everything.
I smelled the stench all this must have been in God's nostrils. Repulsion. No wonder He wouldn't touch me: a rebel, a thief, an ingrate--self-controlled and thinking myself independent. I was a God rejector. No honor for God. No love. No appreciation. And I wanted GIFTS? I had to be out of my mind!
In utter panic I felt for a resolve. How do I undo my self-control? Jesus had taken my sin. Cool. All I could do now was to present myself to God again, afresh to fulfill whatever purpose He might still have for me. Sloughing off the fear that I might just fall down on the floor as a blob, I cast self-control out of myself. I did not fall, but felt myself caught. I had found submission of my self to God. Whole submission. My old life was done away with, and with no exercise of control on my part, I simply waited for whatever God might direct me to do. And boy, was I listening.
In my mind, I knelt at a large, felled pine in a high clearing surrounded by mountains. Though my head was bowed, I perceived the sky and the clouds above my head turning a rosy red with the approach of God's Glory. The Big Guy was there. I said, "You are Glorious God. I am a mud-man. Whatever you want me to do, that I will do." Then I shut up, and I waited.
What had been preached to me by God was the kerygma in His own words. I was deeply involved with it this time. It caused me to search for God with my whole heart. Its stresses produced chemicals in my brain which helped my brain to hear Him. It put me in my place; got me to the point where I could fully surrender and submit to Him. A short while after I did, He said in the softest of voices, "Remember this, and it is all right." I was forgiven. Accepted. Ecstatic, my bowel area filled with the sensation of rising, living water. The sensation rose up to my throat area, and my mouth began to move on its own. "Don't try to control it," the minister next to me said. (Good God! He was still there? In must have been the middle of the night.) The kerygma had flowed around from rejection and guilt to surrender, acceptance, and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. Praise and adoration flowed from my lips in a tongue I simply observed. The energy moving my lips and forming the words was not mine, but the emotions were.
So there is a magic in the kerygma. Maybe the closest thing we can commonly come to real magic: a dead, lost soul is quickened to spiritual life again--the best trick in the world. I hope you are listening.
posted by Daniel C. Branham-Steele at
12:16 AM
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