Our daughter-in-law Julie was teaching her girls–Abby and Erin, twins, they were 8 at the time–about childbirth. Abby did not like what she was hearing.

“I’m not going to have children, Grandpa,” she said. “It hurts too bad.”

I could not argue with that. I’ve been in the hospital numerous times over the years when my wife or my daughter or my two daughters-in-law were in labor. Nothing about it was easy on them or fun for them. They bring us into the world at great personal cost.

I said to Abby, “Yes, it does hurt. But the pain goes away and you’re left with this beautiful child. And you decide that it was worth it.”

This child looked me in the eye and said, “You’re a man. What do you know?”

When I picked myself up off the ground, we had a good laugh over that.

“You’re exactly right,” I told her. “I don’t know a thing about childbirth other than what the women in my life have told me.”

You’re a man. What do you know?

What do you really, really know? What do you know for dead certain? Not, what do you think or believe somewhat. Not, what is your opinion or even your conviction. Not, where is your membership or what is your affiliation.

What do you know?

The Apostle Paul answered that this way. “Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” (II Timothy 1:12)

Paul says, “I know the Lord Jesus Christ. I have total confidence in Him. I am dead sure that I have not believed in vain.”

When the Apostle John wrote about knowing Jesus, he said, “We know that we know him” (I John 2:3).

I know Jesus. And I know that I know Him.

Can you say that?

Where is the evidence that you know Jesus? I want to suggest three evidences or proofs that any of us know the Lord.

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A friend from bygone days tells me why she is put out with most of the churches of her denomination. “There is this male/female thing. You cannot tell me that God in Heaven would rather have a fat, bloated, smug, egotistical know-it-all man as pastor of a church instead of a sharp Godly woman.”

I did not argue with that, and in fact, find that hard to argue with, if those are the choices.

If we asked, she has scripture to back up her position, too. The Apostle Paul put it like this: “For as many of you as are baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)

Open and shut case, right? Not hardly.

It’s true Paul said those things. The problem is he said a lot of other things too. He told how he does not allow women to speak in church (I Corinthians 14:34), cautions women who are prophesying (without ever telling precisely what that means) to cover their heads (I Corinthians 11:5), and then he really does it. The reason the man does not have to cover his head is “he is the image and glory of God,” whereas the woman “is the glory of man” (I Corinthians 11:7).

He said it and left it that way for us to deal with it the best we could.

The next time you hear someone panning the Bible as the result of some council that got together and made all this up, ask why they didn’t take the hard places out, but left them in to befuddle us for the rest of time.

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This happened years ago but David and I still laugh about it.

David was a deacon, a lawyer, and a young Christian who wanted to grow in his usefulness to the Lord. One day he asked to accompany me on my hospital visitation. “I’d like to get more comfortable visiting in the hospitals,” he said. “Sure. Great.”

A good thing for a deacon to do. For any of us to do.

The next morning around 7:30 we met in the medical center parking lot. We greeted each other and I made a couple of suggestions. “The first few patients we see, I’ll introduce you, but don’t say anything. Just pay attention.” Then, we went upstairs.

In 99 percent of the cases, hospital visitation is not rocket science (cliche!). It’s merely a Christian friend calling on another friend. Sometimes it’s big brother ministering to a hurting brother, and often nothing more profound than two old buddies chatting. Normally, my plan was to visit with the person no more than a couple of minutes, and if all was well, to share a verse of scripture (memorized, not read) and lead in a brief prayer of praise and commitment.

After the third or fourth visit, in the stairwell heading upstairs, I said, “David, in the next room, I’ll call on you to pray.” Fine.

A few minutes later as we left the patient’s room, in the hallway he said, “How was that?”

I said, “Well, normally that’s a good thing to pray. But I don’t think that a hospital room when a person is getting ready for major surgery you want to pray ‘Lord, help us to live this day as if it were our last.'”

He said, “Did I say that?” I laughed, “It’s all right. She didn’t seem to mind.”

It’s a cliche’ and not a bad one. The line was first spoken sometime in the decade of A.D. 170-180, thanks to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. (He lived April 26, 121 to March 17, 180. He was a Stoic philosopher and seems to have been the type of ruler Plato had in mind with his concept of “philosopher-kings.”)

The exact quote from Marcus Aurelius: “And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou doest every act of thy life as it were the last.”

A note about cliche’s. They grew to be widely accepted and well-worn figures of speech for good reason: they served a useful purpose.

But as with most generalities, you don’t want to push them too far. An episode of “The Simpsons” bears this out.

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I’m about to raise a question I have no answer for.

A friend whom I’ve not seen in decades called yesterday. In the course of the conversation, when I asked what church he attends, he said, “There’s a tiny church near my house. I’m not sure why I still go there, they’ve had so many fights and splits over the years. When someone asked why I stay, I told him, ‘The Lord hasn’t led me to leave.'”

Why is he still there? Why hasn’t everyone left?

Up in the country, in the land of my youth, a number of longtime friends attend a historic church that meets only Sundays at 8 o’clock. The building has no heat or air, as I recall, and maybe no electricity–not sure about that. Yet, the crowd packs out the little building. They have their service and adjourn to their homes or to some breakfast restaurant. No Sunday School, no evening service, and nothing else as I understand it.

Why do they keep coming? What’s the attraction?

This week, a minister from another state introduced himself over the internet as a bi-vocational pastor of a country church. “Sunday morning only” is how he put it. The people stay for lunch–dinner, they probably call it–and go home. The pastor named another church, with membership in the thousands, where he attends Sunday nights and Wednesday nights.

I find myself wondering why the members of his church aren’t coming to the big church with him. What is the attraction to the small church with very little to offer?

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There are few easy jobs in the typical congregation and plenty of really difficult ones. My candidate for the hardest “elected” position is chairman of deacons.

The absolute toughest and most critical, of course, is the position of pastor. He’s the point man and so much rides on his faithfulness. A close second to that is the deacon chairman.

I say this in full recognition that in our denomination at least–the Southern Baptist Convention–deacons are a varied lot. What they do and how they minister is strictly up to the individual church. Some function as boards of directors, some are teams of servants, some work as a steering committee composed of chairs of every committee in the church, and some are true spiritual leaders.

But there is one thing true in 99 percent of our churches: the chairman of deacons is the number one lay position within the congregation.

On paper, the deacon chair is simply the moderator of the monthly meeting of his group. But in actuality, he (and in the rare instance, she) is the go-between for the pastor and the congregation.

The congregation is having a major problem that involves the pastor. Someone has to visit the shepherd for a confrontational sit-down with him. It falls to the deacon chairman.

Someone or some group within the congregation is out of line. They are attacking the pastor unfairly. For the shepherd to confront them seems self-serving and puts him on the defensive. Someone else needs to do this. The chairman of deacons inherits the job by default. There is no one else better situated.

When you are nominated by the church as a deacon, they convene a council to examine you, then the church ordains you. It’s a big deal. We need to do something just as significant when the deacons choose their leader. The job is the weightiest in the church when done well.

A deacon chairman needs four qualities; if he misses even one, the church could be in trouble.

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In the latter months of World War II, as the Allies were closing in on Germany, the Nazis developed a ruse that worked well for a while.

They would find German soldiers who spoke English well and dress them as Americans. They would arrange for them to be “lost” and to rejoin the Alllied forces as they moved forward. Their task: to infiltrate the American troops and assassinate Generals Eisenhower and Patton.

In time, the good guys developed some tests for exposing the fakes. One German was cut down by the Americans when they saw how he was walking. He was ramrod straight whereas all our troops slouched when they walked.

Another group learned to address the soldier using “pig Latin.” If he was stymied by that, he was exposed.

And they developed questions. Two, I recall, were: Who is Betty Grable? and What position did Lou Gehrig play?

The answers were: movie star/pinup girl and first base for the Yankees. It was understood that every GI in the world would know this.

If you have been in the warfare against the forces of righteousness and the enemies of all that is good and holy for any period of time, you have come up against counterfeits and pretenders, fakes and shams.

The question is, how do you tell? And what should we do about them?

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When I turned on the computer this morning, there was the question. A friend-at-a-distance from many years back with whom I have reconnected on Facebook–FB is great for that very reason–laid the matter before me:

“Why are you Southern Baptist?”

It did not appear that she has an agenda and she didn’t sound angry. She sounded like she wanted my take on this matter.

What I said to her in the brief space which Facebook allows was something like: “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. The Lord captured me there as a sophomore in college and did such wonderful things in my life in this family of churches, I’ve never looked back. Its emphasis on fellowship, the Word, and bringing people to Jesus does it for me.”

That’s pretty much what I said, but what I thought was, “It would take an hour to answer that adequately.”

Let’s see if I can do it in less than that.

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Next Sunday I’m teaching my son’s Sunday School class at our church. A couple of days ago, he sent me the teacher’s lesson book for these young couples. The subject is “living by a higher standard than the unbelieving world” and the text is Leviticus chapters 17-22.

Yesterday I started reading those chapters and began smiling. Oh, these chapters and I are old friends. Good friends even.

There is a story here, one I gladly tell.

It’s a story of persistent, nagging doubt and how God is able to use that doubt to do something extraordinary in the life of the believer who will stay in class.

So, yesterday, after reading the passage from Leviticus, I decided to do something I’ve not done in 45 years. I went back and re-read the 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel “Elmer Gantry.” I found it online by typing in “text of Elmer Gantry.” In this world of technological wonders, as a child of 1940, I am constantly being amazed at what’s available through the computer. But there it was, the entire book.

I was looking for one specific quote, something Sinclair Lewis has a renegade preacher tell another but which, I wager, was Lewis voicing his own doubts about the Christian faith. Preachers and veteran teachers know what this means when I say that I have quoted this from “Elmer Gantry” all through the years but in time I was quoting my quoting. Eventually one forgets the original text and cites what he remembers he said the last time.

I decided it was about time to go back and see if I’d gotten it right, see what the preacher had actually said. I’m no longer the 25-year-old I was when I first came up against that book and the movie it spawned. It could be I’ll see those words differently from the way they hit me as a seminary student.

First, a side note about the movie. Far more of this generation have seen the Burt Lancaster movie “Elmer Gantry,” made in 1960, than have read the book. The problem is, the book is like a 6 hour movie, whereas the movie was necessarily much briefer. The movie covers only about 100 pages of the book.

I recommend the book to every preacher I know. It’s painful reading, I grant you. However, in many ways, Sinclair Lewis knew what he was talking about. The charlatan who was Elmer Gantry–the one in the novel is far worse than the on-screen version played by Burt Lancaster–exposes the charlatanishness in each of us who would deign to speak for God and lead His flock.

In order to convey the full impact of the renegade preacher’s words, I’ll need to quote a long passage from the book.

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Calling the previous article and this one on the Epistle of Jude a “study” would be overstating the case, no doubt. Probably a “treatment” is more like it. Once or twice over lightly.

Those who love the Word will identify with what happened to me. After penning the previous article on Jude, I found that it lingered with me. Several statements in particular would not let me sleep last night. They kept insistig that they deserve more than the light reference we gave them previously.

Let’s call this: 5 statements that describe this faith of ours, from Jude’s epistle.

1) Ours is a revealed faith. (Jude 3)

“…the faith which was once for all entrusted to the saints.”

We did not “get up” this body of beliefs. We did not concoct it, think it up, work it up, knock it together using church councils or schools of prophets. It was given us by the Almighty.

Unless we settle this up front, nothing that follows will make any sense.

In their attack on the Christian faith, some will think they have found the fatal flaw when they point out that “your Bible was written by men; you Christians seem to think it was dropped from Heaven as a finished product.”

No one believes that. We cite the Apostle Peter when he says, “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (II Peter 1:21).

God used human instrumentation. Scriptures are saturated with the fingerprints of its human authors, and far from denying it, we revel in it. We treasure the “warts and all” character of the Bible and the personal references from those used by God to pen it. “I Paul write this greeting in my own hand” (I Corinthians 16:21). “Do your best to get here before winter” (II Timothy 4:21).

2) Ours is a finished faith; it is completed (Jude 3).

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Wellington, a local pastor friend, and I were having lunch recently. As I’m wont to do, I asked what he was preaching the following Sunday.

“Jude,” he said, “and it’s worrying me to death!”

I laughed. “Why?”

He said, “I’m doing a series through some of the shortest–and most overlooked–books of the Bible. I’ve done Philemon and II and III John, and so, locked myself in to do Jude this Sunday. I’m really having trouble finding a hold on it.”

Since I had not read Jude lately, my memory of what that book-of-one-chapter contained was fuzzy, so I had little assistance to offer him. What I said was, “Well, don’t try to cover everything in it. As I recall, Jude quotes from the Apocrypha.”

Wellington said, “That’s what’s got me. I don’t know what to do with that.”

The Apocrypha is the name given to the books between the Old Testament and the New Testament. What’s that? There aren’t any? Maybe not in your Bible, but your Catholic friends’ Bible has them.

Protestants do not consider these little writings as authoritative primarily because the Jews didn’t either.

In vs. 9, Jude pulls an illustraton from a small book titled “The Assumption of Moses.” Then, in vs. 14 he does the same from the apocryphal book of I Enoch.

Now, referring to these books is not the same as endorsing them. Clearly, the Christian community almost from the first has been in agreement that these do not belong in the New Testament.

I said, “When I get back to the office, I’ll read through Jude and let you know if I have anything worth sharing.”

A half-hour later, two things happened. One, I e-mailed him my take on Jude. And a few minutes after that, another pastor, Millington, and I were visiting in my office. He said to me, “I spoke at a Bible study luncheon today. Guess what I spoke on–Jude!”

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