By Chris Mogensen
Fishing the Shoreline on the Boundaries of Life
Picture the following two scenes that took place with two different acquaintances a few years back. I’m sipping strong coffee around the small kitchen table with Greg and Cecile. I had just corrected Greg’s research paper and he’d just taught me a few guitar jazz progressions. Knowing my background, they asked me an innocent enough question: What were the historic differences between Catholics and Protestants? I began to speak with passion about the great privilege we Christians have, each one, in discovering the Bible for ourselves, how the knowledge of my Creator and myself had given direction and stability to my life. Greg listened impassively. Cecile said she just loved to hear me talk about God that way.
That same year I’m sipping strong coffee with someone else I’d just run into in town. I ask Catherine about her home and family and hear some uncomfortable remarks about some religious relative to which I ask: Does anyone in your family ever ask this person what they believe or how they came to their conclusions about faith? She says no, never. They always avoid the question. To which I follow up with: If God were to exist, would you want to know what He was like or would you rather He just leave you alone in your little corner of life? Her immediate answer: Oh I’d much rather He just leave me alone the way I am.
Where do you see these three people in relation to the Gospel?
In my conversations, I like to picture the people I meet as floating on the sea of life, each one with his or her ideas, experiences and convictions. But for me this isn’t just a vast border-less expanse. It is certainly an enormous body of water . . . but with two distinct shorelines. God has placed some borders and boundaries on this crazy world. The sea of life, this choppy mass of ideas and experiences, is bounded by two clear shorelines: the character of God and the character of man.
The Holy Spirit imposes that shoreline on every human existence. John 16:8 says that the Spirit is convincing the world of “guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.” My experiences have brought me to paraphrase that verse, “when He comes He will convince the world that they are a whole lot less than they thought they were, God is a whole lot more than they think He is and we will all be held accountable for what we do with these two ideas.”
So where were these three on the sea of life?
Greg was somewhere in the middle, aimlessly floating, for the moment out of sight of either shoreline. I did ask him a few other questions to see what he thought about himself and his own needs. I don’t think “need” or “responsibility” were in his vocabulary.
Cecile was slowly floating and following the shoreline of God’s character. She was a bit far out to see it clearly but the idea of a personal knowable God made her feel good. She’d hang close to that one for a while.
Catherine had floated a little too close for comfort more than once to the shoreline of God’s character, and each time had pushed herself back into deep water.
So the sea of life has two shorelines. Following either one will bring them closer to the other shoreline. Pushing away from either one will send them back to deep water where those lines on the horizon are less distinguishable. Following both shorelines of the sea will bring people into a cove where the water is a little calmer and will eventually lead them to the source, the God-man Jesus Christ.
Let me encourage you, in your daily conversations, to throw a line in the water from one shoreline and then the other. Ask hypothetical questions, comment on current events, share your ideas that touch on these two great domains and see how folks react. Find out how others think and how they came to think this way. You may find yourself working with the Holy Spirit to bring people along to recognize the boundaries of life and ultimately to know its source.
Questions from the Shoreline.
This has stretched us and motivated us to write a few practical examples of how we’re trying to work this principle out.
Our idea was to use the metaphor of a body of water in the shape of a cove fanning out with two shorelines. This is to illustrate that though people are free (like a boat on the water) God is constantly convincing people of two facts (two shorelines that bound the cove): man’s character and God’s character. No matter how free one might feel, our freedom is limited by these boundaries God himself has ordained. In reality, man is a whole lot less than he thinks he is and God is a whole lot more than we think He is. And since God is constantly working at convincing people of these two truths, as a person accepts one of them, they begin to discover the other. Just as following one shoreline of a cove will eventually lead to the other. This thought guided me in two recent conversations.
Eating breakfast recently with a young Sikh man, I asked about the gods in the Indian faith. He had already concluded that, even though there were many such gods, what seemed most important was the concept of one overall creator-god, just like the monotheistic faiths taught. From this I suspected that, in his thinking about life, he was beginning to accept the life-boundary of God’s nature and so I started asking questions relating to the nature of man. I asked: What character traits do you think are essential for our personal development . . . something that is taught in common in several religions? His answer: that people were created to live moral lives and were not to destroy themselves or others. This seemed to me to be a good beginning to the discovery of the nature of man.
Some days later I was talking with a neighbor who was having some personal problems. When the discussion turned to prayer, I asked him: What is the absolute most important thing that a person could ever say in prayer? His answer: “God, I know you’re there; please help me.” God’s presence and our need. That seemed like the beginning of his discovery of exactly what God is impressing upon every man. As I have opportunity, I’ll be talking to these men again and will pursue the discussions in the area of man’s character and his need. I know that as a person sorts out his or her thinking in these two broad areas concerning God and man and begins to agree with God about them, he or she will likely be open to investigating Scripture with me to see what it says about these same two truths.