This is a slightly edited and modified version of an email update I sent to our financial partners after a trip I made earlier this year to Brazil.
As I write this I’m sitting in the Sao Paolo Airport in Brazil where I’ve been the last week teaching in a YWAM Bible School. I was invited to come and give a week of lectures on the post-exilic prophets (Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi) to a class of 80 students.
The first two days were incredible. The students were engaged, asking questions, feverishly taking notes, and making great strides in their Bible reading and reflection. It was as good of a class as I’ve ever had.
On Wednesday morning, we were beginning the book of Haggai. After reading the opening two verses I asked, as I did repeatedly throughout the week, for someone to make an observation from the text to open up some dialogue. A student pointed out that the prophet refers to God as the “Lord of Hosts”, a military term to refer to God as the commander of heaven’s armies. As the class began to discuss what this might mean I interjected and asked, “How does the God in Christ, Lord of Hosts, confront His people?”
It was a simple question that I wanted us to reflect on hoping it would lead us to think about God’s justice and mercy in the light of the whole of Scripture, and in particular in the light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
It wasn’t 20 seconds after I asked the question that someone in the room suddenly began to cry. Then it was two. Then it was three. After another 30 or 40 seconds there were 5 or 6 people openly crying in the room. I’ve been preaching for over a decade now and I know enough to know that this was not the normal reaction to simply reading the first two verses of Haggai and asking a simple question.
With the handful of students openly crying in class, I decided to pause the teaching/discussion for a moment and allow the Holy Spirit to do whatever He was doing. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what was happening, but something was, so I wanted to give it a chance to breathe. So I announced to the class we were going to pause and let the Spirit minister to us.
Then it happened. Something I’ve never experienced before in my life.
I got about two lines into a prayer when what those handful of students were experiencing hit the whole class, and me, all at once. Suddenly all 80 students, plus staff, and myself and my translator were all weeping. The only way I can describe it was that we had suddenly been confronted with the beautiful kindness of Jesus. We were all looking into the burning eyes of Jesus’ loving mercy and were being shaken, undone, and caught up all at the same time.
The intensity was palpable.
I’ve wept in the presence of God before. I’ve experienced the sweetness of His love and the tenderness of His mercy and forgiveness. This was not that. The only word that seemed fitting was we were confronted, but the confrontation was with intense kindness and beauty. We felt unraveled and yet never more whole, naked in light of the overwhelming presence but not ashamed, and broken by His mercy but being healed to the deepest parts of our soul.
The class never recovered as we openly wept for the next hour. There was no worship team, no ministry, no praying for each other, nothing. At one point at least half of the class was lying face down on the floor and the only thing you could hear was weeping mixed with cries of “Holy, holy, holy!”, laments of “Beauty!”, and whispers that sounded like a paradoxical mixture of agonizing groans and sobs of joyful exuberance.
Some students stayed in that room for hours wetting the floor with their tears. About an hour after I had left the room I went to grab lunch at the cafeteria. As I approached the openair dining hall I saw at least five or six students sitting in the field which was situated to the right of the cafeteria as you walked up. They were spread out, each one sitting alone, just blankly staring out into the Brazilain rainforest with small but steady streams of tears still washing down their cheeks. A few had their Bibles open on their laps but they weren’t looking at them. They just sat gazing into the dense mass of trees as if hypnotized, crying.
The next morning I came into the classroom and the students had already started their morning worship time. When I walked in I was greeted with the same mixture of weeping and worship that I had left the day previous. That worship time went over its scheduled time again as we stood there collectively overwhelmed for the second time.
After class that afternoon a student and I were talking and he told me that he had cried all afternoon Wednesday. Unable to regain his composure he had stayed in his room for the night, missing both lunch and dinner, just reading the Scriptures and praying. By his recounting, he cried virtually the entire time. He described his feelings that night in the same condtradictory terms as I’ve tried to recount that initial class period here, both confrontational and yet unbearably kind. He described it as not wanting to be anywhere else as sheer goodness cascaded over his heart like ocean tide but also not being able to leave that place even if he wanted to, as if he was both choosing to be there and being forced by the sheer weight of glory that was pressing upon him.
So, he told me, he just kept praying and reading. The next thing he knew light was shining into his room through his dorm window. He looked at the time and it was just passed 6 a.m. He had stayed up all night and hadn’t realized it. When we were talking at lunch on Thursday he still hadn’t slept but gave no appreance of having just gone 24 hours without sleeping or eating.
Finally, our week came to a close on Friday, but not before it all hit us again one last time in the final hour of our class. Our week ended with virtually the entire class in puddles on the floor.
At the end of the week one of the school leaders and I were talking about everything that had happened searching for words to describe our experience like we were doing a crossword puzzle. She pointed out that everything first broke out on Wednesday when I had asked, “How does God confront His enemies?” But we never answered the question in our class discussion. That’s exactly when He confronted us.
So how does God confront His enemies?
With His love, kindness, and beauty. As Paul says and I’ve already staed, “It’s the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.” That’s what happened to us and none of us will ever recover.
What I’ll remember forever about that week was the contradiction we all felt. The kindness and the fiercness yet without either nullifying the other. It was the tender patience of a young father and the assault of a enemy all at once so that we all shuttered with fear yet were compelled in the stongest sense into the embrace of a beloved.
The category shattering nature of the encounter, the inability of anyone present to give language to what happened because any phrase we could muster seemed to cut against a core element of what happened, is how I knew it was true. It wasn’t that I was overwhelmed for even the shallowest of waves hold enough force to knock a person over. Nor is it the sweetness that sticks with me for the tastiest treats can rot our stomachs. No, it was the contradiction. That’s how I knew and still know that encounter to be true because Jesus Christ is a contradiction.
He is God and Man.
He is a Man of war and Prince of peace.
He is meek and lowly yet highly exalted.
He is substitute and conqueror.
He is crucified from the foundations of the world and risen.
He is the First and the Last; Alpha and Omega.
He is heaven and hell.
Christ is the place where all contradictions coalesce and thus to be in Christ is nothing but an ongoing encounter with those conradictions. The Christan life, therefore, is our wrestle with the God who is as we grapple with those blessed contradictions.
May the Lord confront us all with His kindness and beauty. Amen.