Finding God in Unexpected Places

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Today, we want to welcome to For Faith & Family, Philip Yancey. This book was first published in 1995.

PHILIP YANCEY: Yes, it was.

LAND: But you have revised it in light of 9/11, because we do live in a very different world, and it is sort of a defining moment. For those of us who are old enough to remember November 22, 1963, you know, the world changed, never to be the same, when President Kennedy was assassinated, and it changed again on September 11th. What were you doing on September 11th?

YANCEY: I was sitting in my basement office, editing some proofs of a student Bible, of all things. I got a call from my brother who said, “Is you television on?” I said, “It isn’t.” But you’re right, the world has changed in major ways. When this book first came out in 1995, the big news was the fall of Communism. No one had predicted that. We had lived under the fear of a threat, making the assumption of a world war and suddenly, boom, it’s all gone, so I had a lot in the prior edition about that, experiences I had going over there. Now, you don’t hear so much about that. That’s kind of old history. You have a whole generation of people who don’t even remember what that fear was about.

LAND: The Cold War, what’s a Cold War?

YANCEY: Exactly, and just as no one predicted the fall of Communism, no one predicted the rise of the terrorist threat, but we have new realities, of course, it hit us with such shock and force on September 11th, and I felt I’m a journalist. This book is a book that deals with a lot of my travels and observations on the current scene, and it was only right to go back and bring it into this century.

LAND: You’ve been known to say that you were vaccinated against spiritual truth, what do you mean by that?

YANCEY: It goes back to the church that I grew up in. We were force-fed. I can’t tell you how many times I went forward to receive Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. You know, if you didn’t do that every few weeks, they worried about you there and after a while, you get vaccinated so that it no longer strikes you as good news, frankly. It didn’t strike me as good news, so I was pretty impervious to Christian books, for example, I wouldn’t watch Billy Graham, or I wouldn’t read the Bible. I had heard all the stuff growing up and, as I mentioned, it was mixed in with a lot of things that I found were wrong, and so I went through a period of time where I said I just don’t want to hear that stuff any more and was not open to it.

LAND: You know, as you were saying, that reminds me of a story I heard from a Southern Baptist Missionary to Brazil, and he was a missionary back into the Amazon, and he tells the story of one of his missionary colleagues who was sort of an older man who had been one of the very first missionaries to go into some of these unevangelized tribes in the deep interior of the Amazon, and they responded very favorably to the gospel, very favorably to the gospel, except for this one village which did not respond. I mean, it took him four years before there was ever a convert and the reason was, there had been someone who had come in before him who had purported to be a missionary who had slept with the women, who had behaved in a very un-Christian manner and they didn’t want to hear anything about this man’s gospel because of the misidentification of it with this man’s perversion of the gospel. He said, you know, I then realized that one of the reasons that Paul had such success was that when he came into Corinth and he came into Athens, there weren’t all these people called Christians who were denying the faith by the way they lived that were inoculating the people against the message of the gospel.

YANCEY: Very true. One of the privileges I have, and I write a lot about that in this particular book, is traveling overseas. About four times a year my wife and I take a visit and my advise to American Christians, if you ever get just kind of fed up with the church here, just the industry of it, go to a place like Brazil, go to a place like the Philippines, go to a place like China, where the gospel still sounds like good news and is transforming society from the grass-roots up. They don’t worry about issues that concern American Christians, who’s in Washington, D.C., do we have enough votes, etc., they are just living the gospel at the most basic level.

LAND: Well, I had a similar experience when I went to what had just until very recently been Soviet Georgia and met with the Baptists there who were really experiencing more persecution from the resurgent Orthodox Church in Georgia than they had received from the Communists. So we went over there and we visited with them and I was in this wonderful church service where literally the windows were all open and there were people standing as far as you could see outside, because they couldn’t all get into the church and the government wouldn’t let them build any churches, and they were having the Lord’s Supper, and then I went back. I flew directly back from there to my home town of Houston and went to a what was then the Houston Oilers football game, and the Astrodome was about two miles from where I grew up, and I was in this midst of these drunken loutish fans who just were behaving in an extremely vulgar and immoral fashion, and I thought, you know, I have more in common and feel more at home with those former Soviet Georgian Christians than I feel here with these fellow Texans within miles of my home-town. And I think it’s true, I think it is absolutely true that we sometimes need to be reminded of needing to feel what it’s like to walk in some other people’s shoes. Now, you once remarked that you were not prepared for beauty, yet it was beauty that finally captivated you and, related to that idea, you have written, “Without nature and art, I could hardly relate to awe and glory and joy.” Share with our listeners how those elements of beauty have impacted your relationship with God and others.

YANCEY: As I mentioned, I grew up in a church that did kind of inoculate me against anything with the word “God” in it, anything spiritual. As I look back on the church, I think of all of the things that they did wrong, they did a number of things right. But of all of the things they did wrong, probably the worst was that they misrepresented God. They gave me an image of God as this scowling, frowning, killjoy out to catch somebody whose having a good time. A lot of people, I find, grow up with that vision of God. They are not all fundamentalists from the South, they are Seventh Day Adventists, they are Mennonites, they are Catholics that I hear from who have that same image of God, left over from childhood, the scowling, super cop. My journey back into faith, because I was inoculated, did not involve Billy Graham rallies or gospel tracks or anything like that. I was impervious to those. Rather as I identify it now, it was three things that brought me back to God. It was the beauties of nature, and it was classical music—I play the piano—and romantic love. As I experienced those things at a vulnerable time in my life, in an overpowering way, I realized that I had been lied to about God, that if the world is full of these joyful and good and pure things and beautiful things, then the One who designed this world was not that kind of scowling super cop I had in mind. About that time, I came across this quotation from G.K. Chesterton that I love, and…

LAND: Have you ever come across a quotation from G.K. Chesterton that you didn’t love?

YANCEY: No, I haven’t. But I’ve come across many that I can’t remember, but I do remember this one. It goes like this, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank,” and that’s the condition I found myself in. I wasn’t sure about God, I had no confidence that there was a God, but I did feel a sense of gratitude. I felt an awakening, a resurrection in my own soul, and I wanted to find someone to thank, and that really began the journey back. So that’s why beauty is so important to me.

LAND: You know, Philip, you enjoy, I can tell, you enjoy asking the hard questions. Your writings have emphasized the hard questions. What is the importance of asking questions as Christians and people of faith?

YANCEY: Boy, I would go back to the Bible. Every once in a while I am invited to speak to a Christian college, and sometimes secular colleges, universities, and because I went to a Christian college, I find that almost every speaker when they come in, they speak to the 80 percent of the kids who love being in chapel, who are nodding their head, who are looking up the Bible when they give a reference, and when I was in a Christian college, I was one of those 20 percent. I was sitting there reading Time Magazine, wishing I wasn’t in chapel, and no one ever spoke to me. So, I decided, if God forbid, as I thought back then, if I am ever invited to speak to a Christian college, I am going to speak to those 20 percent. Nobody ever speaks to them, and so I do. I say, “ You 80 percent, as far as I’m concerned, you can go to sleep. You hear these messages every day. I want to speak to the people who wish they weren’t here.” I say to them, “I understand because I was one of you. I understand why you don’t like being here, but I would challenge you this, especially you philosophy majors, I would challenge you to find a single argument against God, a single question that you have that you struggle with that has been articulated by the great agnostic people like Bertram Russell, Voltaire, which is not already included in the Bible, in the Book of Job, and Lamentations, and Jeremiah, and the Psalms,” and I say, “You are free to reject God, certainly, but I, for one, came to have respect for God who no only gives us the freedom to say no to Him, but also gives us the evidence that we can use, the questions that we can use, and I find that God has a special place in His heart for the doubters, for the strugglers.” You know that scene in the Old Testament of Jacob wrestling all night, and then the angel changed his name and said, “You are no longer to be called the cheat, scandal, you are to be called Israel, one who wrestles with God”. Ever since, people of faith are known as the children of the wrestler. And you look at some of God’s favorites, people like Job, people like Elijah, people like David…

LAND: Saul of Tarsus.

YANCEY: Yes, Saul, there are wrestlers, they are strugglers. I always thought the more questions I had, the more God didn’t like me. Now I kind of think the opposite. If we are honest and we engage God, take those questions to Him, I think God like’s it, He likes a good wresting match.

LAND: Now, in your essay, “God at Large, and Finding God in Unexpected Places,” you note how differently we pray in affluent countries and Christians in other countries where they face persecution. Take a moment and share with our listeners what you noted while you were visiting in Malaysia.

YANCEY: I would say in the United States, in Europe, and comfortable countries, when hardship comes, whether it is, say an economic depression, or threat of terrorism or whatever, Christians will often pray, “Lord take this burden away from us, keep us from going through this hard time.” And just to generalize, when I go to places where Christians really are going through a hard time, instead the prayer is something like, “Lord, help us to bear this burden.” In fact, I was in China and visited with members of the underground church and I asked people who had spent a lot of time there, how do they pray about their government, because many of them had spent time in jail because of their Christian activities. Do they ever pray for a change in government? Do they ever pray, “Lord, take the communistic dictatorship away and give us a democracy”? They said, “I have never heard that prayer.” They never pray that prayer. In fact, they don’t even pray, “Get us out of jail.” They pray, “Help us to be faithful to you in the midst of this.” Boy, that’s a lesson that I want to bring back to those of us in America, because we really don’t know what the future holds, and I think the more we mix comfort and feeling good, the more vulnerable we are in our faith, because there are going to be times both individually and socially where we are not going to be the same comfort, the same feeling good, that Christians happen to be enjoying right now.

This For Faith & Family Insight has been produced by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Join the conversation at ILiveValues.com.