My dear friend in Christ, Ruth Burgner serves on the staff of TMS Global. Her missional voice and global perspective offer a beautiful insight into the Lordship of Jesus:
Jesus, Our Home
At Appletree House in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, neighborhood children – many of them, children of alcoholics – get fed one meal a day, five days a week. Some of them trudge through the snow in subzero degree temperatures, with holes in their shoes and with coats only the weight of a windbreaker. They hazard the bitter cold to come to this little house to be given something to eat and to listen to our missionaries tell Bible stories. When it’s time for them to leave, the children go off to homes where, in many cases, they are the primary caretakers of their siblings. One of our missionaries described these children, whose tender hearts are so battered by “rotten” home lives. “I’m afraid they think Jesus only lives in that one room where we feed them,” she told me.
This is the sorrow of ministry, isn’t it? Where there are children enjoying bread and hot soup five days a week, there is often the ever-present knowing that they will spend most hours hungry for food and affection. Where there is a village receiving medical care from an incoming team of doctors there is the reckoning that there is a neighboring village where people’s suffering could be so easily relieved, if only the doctors would visit them, too.
The Kingdom of God on earth has been inaugurated through Jesus, but there are lots of rooms, homes, and communities where He, we might secretly think, doesn’t seem to have ever come. We know that Jesus is Lord, that He is supreme, that good outweighs evil.
But then there are these stories.
The presence of suffering in a world in which Jesus is King is puzzling indeed, but those who do not acknowledge God’s reign have an even bigger puzzle. Where, for example, has all the goodness in the world come from? And why is it that all people everywhere seem to carry around the same longing in our hearts? It is as if we are all homesick – and for the same home.
The children of Appletree House, for example, trudge through the snow for an experience of love. The atheist in France is drawn, as if by another world, by his enjoyment of beauty. The Buddhist in Shanghai (or, for that matter, nearly anyone you can think of) wants to be virtuous. Our cravings for love, beauty, virtue – like a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods – begin leading us Home. “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven,” writes C.S. Lewis, “but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”
This longing for Home shows up in other worldviews and religions. And, says Sri Lankan evangelist Ajith Fernando, “human aspirations reflected in the other religions find their fulfillment in Christ.” Neal and Mari Hicks, missionaries in Japan, told me, “When Japanese receive Christ, the light that comes into their life is so strong that they, whether they are Buddhists or Shintoists, realize their other hard efforts to reach God were in vain. But in Christ they find great joy.”
Islamics professor, Dr. Mathias Zahniser told me, “Muslims who come to Christ have this exhilarated sense of intimate connection with the God that they have admired and worshipped for a long time.” Another of our missionaries in a Muslim nation told me of a little Muslim girl who discovered a Bible in the basement of her apartment building. She had never seen a Bible before, and began reading the gospels. So taken by the person of Jesus, she put her trust in Him without the input of a missionary—or anyone.
All around the world, Jesus is revealing Himself. Jesus, says Fernando, is “God’s final revelation to the whole human race.” He is the completion of all other truths. “He is the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Rev. 22:13, NIV).
He is our Home.
Adapted from Unfinished, a publication of TMS Global, issue 35. Published in 2006.
