Introduction

Coping with Jealousy

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster

—William Shakespeare

Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, for jealousy dislikes the world to know it..

—Lord Byron

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

—Gore Vidal

Not long ago I turned on our television set to watch Meet the Press, possibly the most important and widely watched news interview program in America, and

who was being introduced to be interviewed but my old friend Richard Land. My mouth fell open. I swallowed. I looked again. I called to Louise, “Guess who is on Meet the Press? Richard Land.” She came in and began watching. “I will never be on Meet the Press,” I thought to myself. On the other hand, why should I be? My views are not important; his are. But why wasn’t I excited that Richard Land has become a national figure? I should be rejoicing that my old Oxonian friend Richard Land is being sought after on one of the most important news programs in the United States.

Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the powerful Southern Baptist Convention, is being brought in frequently on national television programs to discuss moral issues relative to the presidential election. Richard and I were at Oxford University doing our research degrees at the same time. We were both in the same college and had the same supervisor. We became good friends. Richard’s wife, Becky, used to babysit for us. And now there he was on national television. But why wasn’t I thrilled to bits that my friend was now being sought after like this? I think you know.

I believe I am qualified to write this book for three reasons. First, I know what it is to cope with jealousy. My own. Second, I know what it is to cope with another’s jealousy of me—both from enemies and friends. Third, I know what it is like to make other people jealous (hopefully unwittingly) and cause them to have to cope with jealousy.

It is embarrassing to admit that you are struggling with your own jealousy. I don’t like to reveal that a particular person warrants my attention in that way. I can admit to other weaknesses more readily than I can my jealousy. Writing this book may have taught me more about myself than any book I have written.

Jealousy, like the Second Coming, comes in a moment when you least expect it.

For example, one evening in 1994, while we were waiting for our food to be served at a Chinese restaurant in London’s Soho, Charlie Colchester, who had been churchwarden of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), said to Lyndon Bowring and me, “Have you guys heard about what is going on at HTB?” No, we had not. He continued, “A most unusual move of the Holy Spirit has descended on our church.” He began to describe extraordinary things and then asked, “What do you make of this?” I was not blessed.

I remember the sobering day I heard this. I could take you to the very table in the restaurant where we were sitting. I recall looking at Lyndon and he looking at me. Had you put me under a lie detector and asked whether I thought what Charlie described was of God I would have said, “No.” For one thing, I did not want it to be of God. The main thing, however, was that if this truly was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit—and absolutely from God—it would surely have come to Westminster Chapel first!

I looked for every reason not to believe in this, but I had a deep-seated fear this was of God.

The truth is, I was jealous.

How could God do this? I took it personally. Why would God visit HTB with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit? What had they done to deserve this? For example, had the clergy at HTB put themselves on the line as I had done at Westminster Chapel? How many leaders from HTB were out on the streets giving tracts to prostitutes and tourists? And why would God visit an Anglican church? Would God actually affirm these privileged Etonians and posh Brits with their Sloane Square accents? Who in central London had really borne the “heat of the day” (Matt. 20:12)? We at Westminster Chapel had, that’s who.

The following Sunday I publicly cautioned all my members at Westminster Chapel that what was going on “in some places” (all knew I meant HTB) was not of God. But I was wrong. Elsewhere I have described what changed my mind (in The Anointing: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow and In Pursuit of His Glory). Sometime later I publicly climbed down and affirmed that a true move of the Holy Spirit had fallen on Holy Trinity Brompton. That morning we prayed for their rector Sandy Millar and the people there. HTB became a sister church to Westminster Chapel. Sandy and I became very good friends. How thankful I am that God did not judge me for my jealousy and hasty comments.

We have a gracious God. He knows our frame; He does not forget that we are dust (Ps. 103:14). I might have missed entirely what God was doing—all because I was upset that God visited another church and not us.

Jealousy is an easy thing to fall into. This is because it plays into our insecurity. Like it or not, we are all insecure.

I will never forget the first time I attended a reception at Oxford with the faculty of the divinity school and fellow research students. Here I was with Oxford dons and some

of the top minds of the whole world. They had all “arrived” academically. They had the prestige and glory, the degrees, the

credentials, the commendations, and books under their names. What I was not prepared for was how insecure some of them were. I had not expected this. What is more, they were insecure in the very area they should have been the most at home—their brains! But their conversations were a dead giveaway to their need for praise and admiration. One sensed a rivalry among the scholars, a defensiveness when challenged, a glee when an

opposing view was put down, and an obvious delight when complimented.

There are different kinds of jealousy. The most common in the Bible is sibling rivalry—both in the immediate family and (sadly) in the family of God. There is professional jealousy— when doctors are jealous of each other, lawyers are fearful of each other’s status, businesspeople are jealous of each other’s success, where preachers (oh dear) are jealous of each other, and where prophetic voices even compete for who truly speaks

for God! Both within and outside the church a woman may be jealous of another woman’s beauty, or the best of friends can fall out over a romantic competition. There is social jealousy, when one wants to be seen at the right parties or on the social

page of the newspapers. There is political jealousy, where one’s rival is a threat to his or her personal influence, charm, and power. There is in some places aristocratic jealousy, where background and antiquity give a person a certain cache.

There is royal jealousy, when kings and queens claim to be the wealthiest and most respected in the world. There is national jealousy, where a country and its citizens feel superior over another. There is educational jealousy, where one boasts of the most degrees and the best schools. There is jealousy over wealth, pedigrees, job or position, talent, the size or location of one’s office, background, culture, home, car, or friends.

There is, however, a benign envy (motivation for good) and a legitimate jealousy—what Paul calls a “godly jealousy” (2 Cor. 11:2). These are subjects I will look at later in this book.

But sometimes a far more vehement jealousy, sadly, is church jealousy—often found in a wicked denominational and theological rivalry among some churches. As a group of Baptists once put it, following their mission, “Well, we didn’t have much of a

revival last week, but thank God the Methodists didn’t either.” As one Kentucky preacher used to say, “Some people are jealous of your face, some are jealous of your place, some are jealous of your lace, and some are jealous of your grace.”

As I said earlier, jealousy is an easy thing to fall into, but it is still an ugly thing. Jealousy frequently makes us repress—that is, we deny that we are feeling jealous. Repression means to live in denial; thus, we honestly believe what is not true because it is less painful to avoid the truth.

We happened to be in Florida during Hurricane Andrew several years ago. We were staying with close friends. With no electricity and no possibility of fishing, we had to think of things to do. So someone read aloud an article by a well-known preacher, but they did not say who wrote it. I said, “Wow, that is really good—who said that?” When they told me, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was a man who has

opposed my theology and me. I said nothing. Then I realized how jealousy can divert you from solid truth merely because you don’t like the person who states it. I never told anybody at the table what was going on inside me that day, but I knew I had no choice but to accept the truth of the man’s statement and get over how I felt about him.

Jealousy can even camouflage as being the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I may have been on the verge of this when hearing about the move of the Spirit at Holy Trinity Brompton. Jealousy therefore sometimes comes alongside as if it were the very Holy Spirit Himself at work. Before we have had time to reflect clearly, jealousy unconsciously overrules our judgment, takes over our feelings, shapes our thinking, and masquerades as spiritual

discernment. Jealousy lets us proceed and make observations as if we had the wisdom from God. When we are jealous, we tend not to see it as jealousy at all but feel a righteous disgust.

Jealousy can often be a physical feeling. We feel it in our stomachs. We can get a lump in our throats so that it is hard to swallow. For this reason, if not dealt with, jealousy can have a negative physical effect on our bodies. As holding a grudge is injurious to your health, as I pointed out in Total Forgiveness, so too is jealousy. Jealousy climbs inside our haughty hearts and turns our faces green while we continue to wear a plastic smile.

It churns us inside while, unless we are alone, we act as though we are thrilled to bits. If we are alone, we just feel sickened but tend not to admit the real reason we feel a particular way. It can be so painful to admit you are jealous.

We are usually not jealous of those much older than we are. We are more prone to jealousy when another is much the same age as we are—or younger. Oh, yes, we are threatened by a younger person with a lot of promise, energy, good looks, and cleverness. We are normally not jealous of the heroes of a previous generation. It is safe to praise the dead. The Pharisees had no objectivity about themselves, as Jesus pointed out: “You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29–30). The Pharisees thought they were a cut above disobedient Israelites of a previous era, not realizing how they themselves were no different. I knew of a London pastor who would not allow Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s

books to be sold in his church—that is, until after Dr. Lloyd-Jones died! Then it became safe to allow his books to be sold.

Those living in our own era, within the general range of our intellectual perspective or age bracket, will normally be the targets of our jealousy. Jealousy has a curious way of connecting to one’s geographical location too. This is why Jesus said, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24). The reason that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country is because we are jealous of those near us who make it “big.” I happened to be in Australia when Steve Irwin, their most popular citizen and the man who made worldwide fame through his love and ability with animals, died. I was stunned

to hear so many Australians criticize him. There is no doubt he was far more popular in America and Great Britain than in his own country.

I know what it is to be threatened by another person’s charisma, intellect, fame, financial security, personality, charm, good looks, talent, brilliance, sense of humor, wisdom, reputation, and position. Take my friend Lyndon Bowring. He lights up a room the moment he walks into it. More people regard him as their closest friend than you can count on two hands. When he is at a table with friends, they all make eye contact with him, not me. Take Rob Parsons. I sat on the platform at a Spring Harvest celebration and watched him enthrall four thousand people with his Welsh oratory in the Big Top. I did my best to look excited. If only I could speak like that. I have watched people like J. John, Gerald Coates, Steve Chalk, Jeff Lucas, and David Pawson do the same thing—leave a crowd spellbound by their articulate flow of words, charisma, and ability to hold the attention of a vast audience. Not long ago Tony Campolo and I were speakers at a conference in Detling, Kent. His communication skills are, simply, as good as it gets. I felt utterly inferior to him.

And then there is Billy Graham. He has made more preachers jealous than you could count—not dozens, hundreds, or thousands but hundreds of thousands. I also know more church leaders who will give you their theological reasons why Billy cannot possibly have been raised up by God as a sovereign instrument of the Holy Spirit but is only a creation of the press. You can rarely get a single one of them to admit that the real issue—you could call it the elephant in the room—is not theological at all but jealousy.

I will never forget when I first met Billy Graham. I was a student at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville. I would not have been jealous of him at that stage; he was more of an idol. Many years later as minister of Westminster Chapel I met him again. The next day I was asked by a friend, a church leader, “What was it like to meet Billy Graham?” Before I could finish my answer, he said, “You may not agree with me, but I maintain that with a face like that he could not possibly be intelligent.” Oh yes, those were his exact words. Could jealousy lie behind a comment like that?

What was often embarrassing to me was that a lot of people thought I was close to Billy Graham just because he preached for me at Westminster Chapel. “I hear Billy Graham was in London. Did he phone you?” No. Another friend told me he rode in the car with Billy Graham from Heathrow to his hotel in central London. I swallowed hard and said, “Fantastic!” Another asked, “Billy Graham is preaching at Earl’s Court. Were you invited to sit on the platform?” No. As a matter of fact, when Louise and I took some Americans to Earl’s Court to hear him—friends who had hoped to meet Billy through us—we were put in an overflow room to watch him on a big screen. How humbling. My friends thought I had more influence than that! Even getting close to him was out of the question.

On another occasion, I did actually sit on a platform near him at Wembley Stadium. But I noticed that other ministers there were invited to spend time with him in a private room afterward, but I wasn’t. I remember the pain of going back to Victoria on the train from Wembley Park feeling left out. Had I been invited, I would not have felt jealous; but since I wasn’t, I did.

Then, of course, there are those who are quick to tell you that this sort of thing—missing out on having time with Billy Graham—doesn’t bother them one bit. Why then is it important for them to express this? I suspect there are basically two kinds of people: those who admit to jealousy and those who boast that they are never jealous, like those who say they could have tea with the queen of England and never tell it. I heard a pastor literally say, “I have never been jealous of anyone.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Jealousy sometimes manifests as fear or resentment of another’s success, speaking against the person, going on a vendetta to hurt their credibility, keeping them from being admired, or actually engaging in a conspiracy to destroy them—as in the case of King Saul pursuing David. The origin of jealousy is to be found in our natural insecurity. It is a part of our fallen nature. It is a proof of original sin, as Cain’s murder of Abel shows (Gen. 4). Whereas Paul said we should “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Rom. 12:15), the truth is, it is often not too hard to mourn with those who

mourn. Indeed, minimal grace is required to weep with those who weep. But rejoicing with those who rejoice takes considerable grace, inner security, and stature.

A true friend, therefore, is not necessarily one who will weep with you but one who will rejoice with you when you have cause for rejoicing. When you have some exciting news, your first impulse is to want to share it. But with whom? I remember telling a friend of something good that just happened to me. The expression on his face showed me that he was not thrilled—but he tried hard. I realized I should not have told him. He was a friend, yes, but hardly a good enough friend to rejoice in my good news and certainly not the kind of friend I wanted at that moment. It is lonely when you have nobody you can share good news with. But there is a lesson here—how all of us should be slow to share very happy news, especially if it has to do with one’s self-esteem.

My friend Rob Parsons says he has a hunch that the only people we might be reasonably sure will always rejoice in our successes are our own father and mother!

Jesus rejoices in good things that come our way, and He would never knowingly make someone feel jealous.

As I wrote this last paragraph, I heard a “ping” on my computer that told me I had a new e-mail. I opened it. It contained an item that inflated my ego a bit and made me want to share it with my friends. The list narrowed down as I thought, “Whom can I share this with?” Not many. A true friend will not only rejoice when you rejoice but will also keep

another from feeling jealous if you can help it.

Productive and Counterproductive

However, jealousy isn’t all bad. There is an envy that is not sinful. Whereas jealousy that manifests as resentment is rooted in our fallen nature, there is a benign envy that is traceable to what John Calvin calls “special grace in nature.” It allows for a

little bit of good in all of us, that is, what is noble. This means

that God the Creator gives special gifts, talents, and motivations in every human being. Special grace in nature partly means that God has instilled in all creatures—in every man

and every woman—a measured potential for good. It comes through creation. Special grace in nature has nothing to do with salvation.

This concept became the foundation for the reformed doctrine of “common grace”—called that not because it is ordinary but because it is given commonly to all people. God’s common grace is what keeps the world from being totally topsy-turvy. It is the reason we have law and order, policemen, firemen, doctors, and nurses. It is what accounts for the good Samaritans of this world (Luke 10) and the firemen who risked

their lives in New York City on September 11, 2001. Your IQ, natural talent, personality, ability to perform, and psychological makeup are all rooted in God’s common grace. It produces an Albert Einstein, a Mother Teresa, Nobel Prize winners, a Sergei Rachmaninoff, and a Winston Churchill.

So too the good kind of envy—productive envy—is rooted in this special grace in nature. A motivation to make something of your life has its origin in common grace. God uses it to produce the movers and shakers of this world.

Therefore, one of the strangest ironies regarding envy is that it can be a positive motivation to make you do something worthwhile with your life. Martin Luther said that God uses sex to drive a man to marriage, ambition to drive a man to service, and fear to drive a man to faith. But what makes a person ambitious? The “preacher” in Ecclesiastes has the answer.

According to Ecclesiastes 4:4, “All labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor.” Really? Could this be true? If I am to believe Ecclesiastes 4:4, nothing gets done apart from envy. This envy can be either benign or evil, either productive or counterproductive. The envy described in Ecclesiastes 4:4 emerges in one of two ways (or both): (1) productive envy is the desire to outdo what has preceded you (what motivates athletes in the Olympics); (2) counterproductive envy is the wish (consciously or unconsciously) to make another feel envious, although God may overrule and turn this to good.

It is not every day that a verse leaps out at me in the normal course of my daily Bible reading plan. When this happens, I usually write the date in the margin of my Bible. On April 18, 1988, my reading included Ecclesiastes 4:4, a verse I must have read dozens of times. But for some reason this verse leaped out at me as if I had never seen it before:

And I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

I cannot explain why, but this verse gripped me deeply that morning. It not only took hold of me, but it also stayed with me for days and weeks and months. It would not betoo much to say I was consumed with this verse for a long while. It has ultimately

led to the writing of this very book. Even if the preacher (writer of Ecclesiastes) was not stating an eternal, universal principle but merely his own opinion and observation, I had

a sinking feeling that verse surely described me. It should not have made me feel bad, but it did.

For one thing, I felt exposed. Embarrassed. I would not want anybody—especially my supporters or members of my church— to find out that such a verse actually described me. Surely I was above this. It may describe others, but not me! But if somehow

it does describe me, why was I seeing this now—and not before? Was I to believe that all I have done and have achieved, such as it is, was motivated by envying what others had—or even by a desire to make people envious of me? Was it such a carnal motivation, and not the Holy Spirit, that lay behind all I have wanted to accomplish? Perhaps.

I could have told you in total honesty that I felt led of the Holy Spirit to finish the university, go to seminary, and then bring my family across the Atlantic to do research at Oxford. And I believe I was. But reading Ecclesiastes 4:4 supplied me with a parallel explanation as to why I entered and finished seminary and Oxford University. Was it the Holy Spirit, or was it explained by envy?

However, God’s common grace is applied in more ways than Ecclesiastes 4:4 might allow. There are those who help others and do so without envy as a motivation. Ecclesiastes describes a lot of people but not necessarily all. But it certainly describes

a lot of us. Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, says that the strongest urge in a human being is the desire to feel important—or be admired. I do know that the human heart is “deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

My point is, there is a positive side to envy and jealousy. This book will touch on this later on, especially when it comes to God’s jealousy and godly jealousy.

But the main focus will be on jealousy that is not good— counterproductive jealousy. I will deal with that jealousy that bedevils all of us in three particular ways: coping with jealousy in ourselves, coping with people who are jealous of us, and coping with the fact that we make others jealous.

I will also make suggestions as to how we all can overcome jealousy. I believe if we grasp these, it can change our lives for good—and set us free.

Jealousy is often easy to see in others but so hard to see in ourselves. And sometimes it is hard to see in others. It can also be difficult sometimes to accept that jealousy is a huge part of your hero’s motivation!

Why this book? To help set you free. It should help bring us down from our pedestal. It will help us accept ourselves. It should rid us of some of our self-righteousness. It should

help keep us from thinking too highly of ourselves or taking ourselves too seriously. I write books to change lives, and the purpose of writing this book is to bring us closer to recognizing and overcoming our own jealousy.

This book will help you to understand others as well as to understand yourself.

John 5:44

If I can bring you to grasp John 5:44—“How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?”—in the light of the principles laid down in this book, you will become less jealous and less desirous to make others jealous. I see this verse as one of the most important verses in Scripture and a key to coping with jealousy. Indeed, you will want to protect others from the hurt of being jealous of you. You will not be so hurt by your own jealousy. You will not take another’s jealousy so seriously.

Jesus never wanted to make people jealous. The more you are like Jesus, the less you will be motivated by jealousy, the less you will be affected by others’ jealousy, and the more you will grieve if you make others feel jealous. Jesus was not motivated to do what He did because He was envious or because He wanted people to admire Him. He was totally, utterly, and absolutely jealous for the glory of God. All He ever did and said was to mirror the will of the Father: “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19). He is the only human being who was totally exempt from the point of view raised by Ecclesiastes 4:4.

Defining Jealousy

There are many definitions of jealousy—all of them may be apt. The complexity of jealousy allows one to define it in different ways. It has been described as the fear of another’s success. It is threatened self-esteem. It is resentment toward the superior status or success of a rival or friend. It is hostility toward a rival or one believed to enjoy an advantage. It is the fear of being supplanted.

Many definitions of jealousy imply a triad composed of a jealous individual, a partner, and a third-party rival. Jealousy frequently involves three parties. Most definitions describe jealousy as a reaction to feeling threatened.

One of my first memories of being jealous was when I was ten years old. A boy I did not know came to the house next door to see my friend Dick. I resented this kid elbowing in on my territory. Dick said to me, “He gets your goat, RT. He gets your goat.” That is the first time I heard this expression. His saying that to me got my goat! Although my Oxford dictionary defines this phrase as merely “to annoy,” getting your goat sometimes comes close in describing jealousy.

When someone gets your goat, then chances are you are jealous—whether they try to compete for your best friend, jump the line in front of you, are very assertive and have buckets of confidence, become the center of attention, get a compliment, get chosen for a job, have a higher profile, or make the front-page news. An overly confident person often gets our goat. So does the untalented person who gets what we feel is undeserved attention. The person with very little talent but who is bubbling over with confidence will irritate us.

One of the purposes of this book is to get you to see jealousy in yourself—and admit it to yourself. We will not make progress if we sweep the dirt under the carpet.

Two Greek Words

The Greek word zelos—zeal, anger, boiling, or ferment—has been translated either as “envy” or “jealousy.” But zelos can also have a positive use. Zelos can be good—very, very good—and it can be bad—very, very bad. Positively, it can mean “zeal” or

“eagerly desiring” a spiritual gift, as in 1 Corinthians 12:31. It can refer to a “godly jealousy” (2 Cor. 11:2). Zelos used negatively describes a sinking feeling in your stomach when being threatened; it can arise in someone from their not excelling while seeing another excel. The Sadducees were “filled with jealousy” when they saw the successes of the earliest church (Acts 5:17; see also Acts 17:5). It is the anger that comes from your blocked goals that your rival reached. It is the agitation of not getting what you want and seeing others get what they want. It is a resentment that boils up inside when a friend or rival succeeds, surpasses us, or when we feel left out. It is the fear of being replaced. It is what we feel when being unfavorably compared to others. You can be jealous or envious of someone you have never met. You can be jealous of someone who is famous—if they are brilliant, beautiful, rich, or very happy.

There is another Greek word—phthonos—that means the same thing, although some modern versions are translating it as “envy.” Unlike zelos, which can be used positively or negatively, phthonos in the New Testament is always used negatively except for James 4:5, referring to God’s Spirit jealously yearning for us. Phthonos therefore can be translated either envy or jealousy, depending which version you read. The translator decides. For example, Pilate knew it was out of “envy” (phthonos) that the Jews handed Jesus over to him (Matt. 27:18; Mark 15:10). But some versions would use “jealous” (gnt) or “jealousy” (jb). The verbal form of phthonos is translated as “envying” (Gal. 5:26). Some preach Christ out of “envy” (Phil. 1:15). The two Greek words zelos and phthonos mean essentially the same thing—envy or jealousy.

Envy and Jealousy

Is there a difference, then, between envy and jealousy? Probably. Both zelos and phthonos are used in Galatians 5:20–21, translated “jealousy” and “envy.” However, we are not dealing so much with the etymological meaning in the Greek language

but in the way the two English words have come to be understood. Ninety percent of the time they are identical, and dictionaries use one to define the other. Envy tends to focus

on the other person’s things; jealousy includes animosity toward the person. We are sometimes ready to admit to envy, as when

we say, “I envy your vacation—I could use one myself.” But we don’t admit to jealousy; it is the nastier of the two words. This is why God is not envious of us; He is not envious of our things. But He admits to being jealous of us; He wants a relationship with our person.

Envy is also coveting what others have; jealousy is the fear of losing what you have. Envy is natural and passive. Jealousy is vengeful and active. Even though I believe that jealousy is stronger than envy—or worse than envy—we should not push the distinctions too far. You can have envy and jealousy at the same time. I have chosen for the most part to refer to jealousy in this book, realizing nonetheless that envy and jealousy can often be used interchangeably.

Speaking generally, to oversimplify, I take the view that jealousy is stronger—and worse—than envy. This is because merely to envy basically means to covet—to want what someone else has. That exposes all of us for sure. And yet you can possibly covet without seriously hurting anybody. But that does not excuse us, because the tenth commandment says, “You shall not covet” (Exod. 20:17). We must never justify ourselves in our envy or make excuses. For the tenth commandment makes coveting—envying—a sin. As we will see below, envy was an integral part of the original sin in the Garden of Eden. The tenth commandment convinced Paul he was a sinner (Rom. 7:9). We all envy; we all sin. And yet envy is natural.

Is not jealousy natural? It certainly comes from our sinful condition, but jealousy emerges more clearly when coveting becomes resentment and the devil somehow gets in. Whereas

envy is an inevitable part of our sinful condition, jealousy is envy uncontrolled. Envy—what you feel in your heart—is passive and unavoidable; jealousy—when you condone, nurse, and express what you feel—is more harmful. Envy is wanting what you don’t have—but keeping the lid on. Jealousy is wanting what you don’t have—and taking the lid off. We cannot avoid envy, but we must keep it from getting out of control—and

manifesting in a way we will always regret.

Like it or not, then, we all have envy. We all have jealousy too. But jealousy is envy that we failed to keep under control—as when the dam bursts. The volcano erupts. The tongue becomes the fire of hell (James 3:6). Although we must confront envy in ourselves and admit to what we are feeling, jealousy is what gets us into trouble. Jealousy manifests largely as uncontrolled resentment and is often triggered by the fear of losing something.

Whereas envy is basically coveting what belongs to someone else, jealousy wants that person to be hurt. Envy wants the person’s gift; jealousy wants that person to lose their gift. Envy wants that person’s beautiful new car; jealousy wants it scratched—or smashed. Envy wishes one had the other person’s new home; jealousy wants it to burn down. Envy desires the person’s job; jealousy wants them to get fired. Envy is coveting

and therefore sin. But jealousy is a worse sin.

Jealousy is envy manifested. Envy is the thought; jealousy is the obsession—when you are continually preoccupied with that thought. Jealousy is what spews out the wicked comment or gives birth to the evil deed. Although it is a sin to envy, you can avoid needless trouble if you deal with it while it is only in your thought life. But when you allow it to govern you, dominate you, and then you express what you feel—whether by word or deed—you can get yourself into a lot of trouble.

You may ask: at what point does one cross over from envy to jealousy? On a scale of one to ten (one to five being envy, six to ten being jealousy), when does one cross over a line, say, from five to six? I reply: when the thought becomes an obsession. It is not always so easy to tell, but keeping this in mind, just maybe, admitting to yourself what you are really feeling could make a difference when you struggle in this area. Keep a lid on your

envy. Refuse to let it grip you. Don’t go there in your thoughts. Don’t nurture it, don’t justify it, don’t dwell on it, and don’t encourage it. Confess it, and turn from it.

A close friend confided in me how he feels “smug” (his word) when he hears of bad things happening to others—especially to those he doesn’t particularly like, and sometimes even to people he likes. He had never admitted this to anyone before. He felt ashamed. I appreciated his honesty. It reminded me of this searching proverb: “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice” (Prov. 24:17). It is a sin to feel smug; it is a greater sin to gloat. One way to know if you have crossed over a line into full-blown jealousy is whether you gloat if your enemy falls. The proverb continues, “The Lord will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from him”

(v. 18). Such smugness or gloating is a dead giveaway that love is absent, for love “does not envy” (1 Cor. 13:4—“love . . . is not jealous” [gnt]). A great English preacher, F. B. Meyer, admitted to his struggle with jealousy when another great preacher, G. Campbell

Morgan, returned to England’s Westminster Chapel after being in America. “‘It was easy,’ he said, ‘to pray for the success of Campbell Morgan when he was in America. But when he came back to England and took a church near mine it was somewhat different. The old Adam in me was inclined to jealousy, but I got my heel upon his head and whether I felt right toward my friend, I determined to act right.’”4

When we examine our hearts in this area, the procedure can be very painful. Alarming. Embarrassing. How dare we feel smug when bad things happen to others—whether friends or enemies? But we do. Our fathers called it total depravity. We in the twenty-first century tend to gloss over the raw, unvarnished, sinful condition of humankind these days. But it is this aspect of humanity that made hymn writers centuries ago use words

like vile, wretch, worm, and foul in their hymns to describe all of us.

This book might therefore have an unexpected fringe benefit: to help you to see your sin. If you are like me, having been brought up with a belief one could live without sinning if you are truly saved (a belief I no longer hold), the insights of this book could help you to see why we need to confess our sins to God every day. After all, when Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer, the assumption was that we would need to pray, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us” (Luke 11:4). Before our lives can truly change, we need to see our sin and the need to change.

Although jealousy and envy can have their own distinct meaning, keep in mind that these words are often used interchangeably in Scripture, and I will do this too at times. Both

envy and jealousy arise from the same insecurity within us. A goal for this writer, and hopefully every reader of this book, will be to keep envy—which is natural—from becoming jealousy—which may be demonic. Jealousy often means that the

devil got in—and won a victory.

As we will see, God Himself is a jealous God (Exod. 20:5; 34:14). And yet it is because He loves us so much. God is jealous of every part of our lives that Satan has. It is not only because it is rightfully His, but also because He knows that when He has it all, it is how we were created to live. Indeed, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us” (James 4:5, esv). This shows how jealousy can be a good thing—when it is the Holy Spirit at work. Furthermore, our own envy is an entry point in us by which God frequently gets our attention. God clearly plays into our natural desire to acquire more by giving us the promise of blessing by our giving. “‘Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it’” (Mal. 3:10). Paul said much

the same thing: “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously” (2 Cor. 9:6). In other words, God appeals to our self-interest to get our attention. Does this surprise you?

Some people might fancy that they are quite above being motivated by the promise of blessing. Just remember, the heart is deceitful (Jer. 17:9); we may think one thing and be completely wrong. The truth is, God always motivates us to obedience by the promise of our being better off if we obey.

To summarize, there are two kinds of jealousy: productive jealousy and counterproductive jealousy. Godly jealousy can be productive. There is also a benign envy that can be a motivation for doing good; God can use it. Counterproductive jealousy is what eats our souls and leaves us bitter and impoverished. It is one of Satan’s favorite vehicles by which he brings us to despair and destruction.

We turn now to the main theme of this book—namely, counterproductive jealousy that is a force for evil and not for good. It comes from our sinful nature that we did not overrule by the fruit of the Holy Spirit and is evidence of a worldly, carnal spirit (1 Cor. 3:3; Gal. 5:20). James curiously calls it “wisdom”—that is, wisdom of the devil. Indeed, “bitter jealousy” is “not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic” (James 3:14–15, esv). The sooner we see it in ourselves and want to deal with it, the better. This book is designed to help you see it and overcome it when you discover

it in yourself. It is designed to help you cope with it when others are jealous of you. It is designed to help you see when you could be causing others to feel jealous (even if inadvertently)—and how to stop it.

Nothing in my hand I bring,

Simply to Thy cross I cling;

Naked, come to Thee for dress;

Helpless, look to Thee for grace;

Foul, I to the fountain fly;

Wash me, Savior, or I die.5

—Augustus Toplady

Walking, Crawling, Dead or Alive

I ran.

My bare feet pounding the pavement were burning from the sunbaked asphalt. Each contact between flesh and blacktop provoked bursts of pain as if I were stepping on broken glass. The deserted country road, stretching into the horizon, felt as if it were conspiring against me. No matter how hard I pushed myself, the safe place I was desperate to reach eluded me.

Still, I ran.

Had a thousand angry hornets been in pursuit, I couldn’t have run any faster. Daddy’s instructions had been simple: I had to be a big girl, run down the street as fast as my legs could carry me, and get help. There was nothing complicated about his request. Except for the fact that I’d have to abandon my hiding place under the kitchen table and risk being seen by the armed madman who had barricaded himself with two hostages in my bedroom down the hall. I knew, however, that ignoring Daddy’s plea was out of the question.

And so I ran.

Even though Daddy struggled to appear brave, the anguish in his eyes spoke volumes. Splotches of blood stained his shirt just below his right shoulder. The inky redness was as real as the fear gnawing at the edges of my heart. I wanted to be a big girl for the sake of my daddy. I really did. But the fear and chaos now clouding the air squeezed my lungs until my breathing burned within my chest.

My best intentions to get help were neutralized, at least at first. I remained hunkered down, unable to move, surrounded by the wooden legs of six kitchen chairs. I had no illusions that a flimsy 6 x 4 foot table would keep me safe, yet I was reluctant to leave what little protection it afforded me.

In that space of indecision, I wondered how I might open the storm door without drawing attention to myself. One squeak from those crusty hinges was sure to announce my departure plans. Closing the door without a bang against the frame was equally important. The stealth of a burglar was needed, only I wasn’t the bad guy.

Making no more sound than a leaf falling from a tree, I inched my way out from under the table. I stood and then scanned the room, left to right. I felt watched, although I had no way of knowing for sure whether or not hostile eyes were studying my movements. I inhaled the distinct yet unfamiliar smell of sulfur lingering in the air, a calling card left behind from the repeated blasts of a gun.

I willed myself to move.

My bare feet padded across the linoleum floor.

I was our family’s lifeline, our only connection to the outside world. While I hadn’t asked to be put in that position, I knew Daddy was depending on me. More than that, Daddy needed me to be strong. To act. To do what he was powerless to do. I could see that my daddy, a strong ex–Navy man, was incapable of the simplest movement. The man whom I loved more than life itself, whose massive arms daily swept me off my feet while swallowing me with an unmatched tenderness, couldn’t raise an arm to shoo a fly.

To see him so helpless frightened me.

Yes, Daddy was depending on me.

Conflicted at the sight of such vulnerability, I didn’t want to look at my daddy. Yet my love for him galvanized my resolve. I reached for the storm-door handle. Slow and steady, as if disarming a bomb, and allowing myself quick glances backward to monitor the threat level of a sudden ambush, I opened the storm door and stepped outside. With equal care, I nestled the metal door against its frame.

I had to run.

I shot out from under the carport, down the driveway, and turned right where concrete and asphalt met. The unthinkable events of the last five minutes replayed themselves like an endless-loop video in my mind. My eyes stung, painted with hot tears at the memory. Regardless of their age, no one should have to witness what I had just experienced in that house—let alone a seven-year-old girl. The fresh images of what had transpired moments ago mocked me with the fact that my worst fears had just come true.

I had to keep running.

Although I couldn’t see any activity through the curtains framing my bedroom window, that didn’t mean the gunman wasn’t keeping a sharp eye on the street. I hesitated, but only for a moment more. What might happen gave way to what had happened. I had to get help. Now, almost frantic to reach my destination, I redoubled my efforts.

I ran on.

To get help for Momma and Daddy. To escape the gunman. To get away from all the threatening letters, the sniper gunshots, the menacing midnight phone calls, the home invasions—and the devil who seemed to be behind so many of them.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.

PAY ATTENTION:

EVERY BUSH IS BURNING

Pay attention.1

—Jesus

Brace yourself. This book is set to revolutionize your understanding of evangelism. Revolution—from the Latin revolvere—means “a fundamental change.” This revolution stands to shake the very roots of your faith, rattle the range of your mission, and roll the very limits of your freedom.

Wait a minute, you say! There’s a lot about me in that paragraph; I thought evangelism is about reaching out to others.

Remember “a fundamental change.” I think evangelism changes me as much as anybody.

A friar returned to his monastery after an Ignatian thirty-day retreat. Over granola the next morning, he was interrogated by a grumpy old member of the community who complained, “We’ve been working like slaves while you’ve been swanning around doing nothing! And look at you! You don’t look any different.”

“You’re quite right, I probably don’t,” was the reply. “But you do.”

Jesus’ last words in the gospel of Luke are these: “Go out and proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins.”2 But a biblical understanding of repentance is not red-faced anger at other people’s sins but red-faced embarrassment at my own brokenness and complicity in the evils and injustices of the world. Proclaiming repentance is as much about reminding me of my waywardness as it is about setting other people straight.

When I am engaging with people of other religious faiths, I find myself unable to commit to their conclusions or agree with their assessments. Yet at the same time I come away encouraged by the spiritual truths found in their traditions, thrilled by new insights into my own faith, and more passionate than ever about being a disciple of Jesus. The truth is illuminated and elongated in my mind, and my presuppositions and myopic perspectives are challenged and corrected in the process. Anything less would not be a conversation and would imply that truth is a proposition and not Christ.

To be a real agent of God, to connect with the neighbor … each

of us needs to know the truth about himself or herself.3

—Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

I believe the lifeblood of evangelism is not propositions, but prepositions. For God to do something through us, God must be doing something in us. If we are not always evangelizing ourselves, we have no business evangelizing others. In fact, it is usually as God’s grace courses through us to someone else that we become aware of God’s love in and for us. Evangelism is an invitation for broken people together to meet the Christ who loves broken people. We all are damaged but loved, crushed but cherished, with a divine embrace. When love is the motivation for evangelism, nudging is love in action. And the cracks in our broken vases are where Jesus leaks out first.

Evangelism Jesus-style

I define evangelism as “nudge” and evangelists as “nudgers.” Evangelism is awakening each other to the God who is already there. Evangelism is nudging people to pay attention to the mission of God in their lives and to the necessity of responding to that initiative in ways that birth new realities and the new birth.

God only asks that we do what we do best, which is nudge; God takes it from there. The nudging act—the human contact, the meeting of eyes, the sharing of space, the entanglement of words, the sense of bodily interaction—is to the soul what blood is to the body. Without nudging, the body cannot reproduce.

Every person who crosses your threshold today is ripe for nudging. A nudge happens in proximity. Even the nudges across the Internet or by phone take place in a proximity of relationships. The integrity of a nudge requires that it be welcomed and that it be reciprocal. The purpose of a nudge is to manifest Christ in a moment of mutual knowing, which benefits both the person being nudged and the nudger. Nudging is not best driven by fear or by some need within the nudger. Nudges are not contrived but are the natural consequence of being with someone in a moment and wishing them to join you in recognizing a God-moment. The best nudges culminate in a grunt of mutual recognition. God nudges me because God likes me. I nudge others because I like them. There is an implied caring that comes with nudging.

So there you have it. Nudge—gently pushing people off their seats more than it is sitting people down or driving them to their knees. Nudging is more about sowing than reaping. To be clear, nudging encompasses the full range of gardening—from dropping a tiny seed into the ground, to loosening the dirt, watering, weeding, fertilizing, protecting from predators, picking the fruit, and even helping, in Jesus’ words, “the birds of the air … nest under its shade.”4 But every encounter is aimed not to “bring in the sheaves.” Nudging aims to bring people less to a decision than to an impression: not just to an hour of decision but a lifetime impression of God’s presence and the nearness of God’s kingdom. In fact, isn’t this the essence of sanctified living: to make our whole life a Un Oui Vivant,5 a “Living Yes” to the living Christ?

This is exactly the opposite of ignoring the need for a decision. Rather, it is respecting and reverencing the process, if one looks back on it, by which each of us came to that place of decision. When an impression leads to a decision, it’s “Hallelujah!” (or in my preferred way of stating it, “Javalujah!”) time. But the ultimate answer to that question “Who do you say that I am?” is best forthcoming from another question: “What’s up?” Or when translated theologically, “What’s the I AM up to in your life?” We find the living One in the midst of living.

Images exist not to be believed but to be interrogated.6

—Andy Grundberg

Don McCullin is a British photojournalist who specializes in capturing images of the downtrodden and forgotten and making these moments of forsakenness universal. McCullin is also one of the greatest war photographers of all time. He says this about the role of a professional photographer: “If you take one good picture a year for each year of your career, you are doing well.”7

If, for every year of your life, one person honestly relates that God nudged them through you, and that your nudge had kingdom significance to them, you are a master evangelist; well done! Of course, we ought always to be hoping and praying for what I call these ushering nudges. Always be closing. Even with a gentle nudge, or a God-wink nudge, always be closing in prayer and desire. But remember that every Jesus nudge, whether it leads someone to an altaring moment or not, is part of an answer to a two-thousand-year-old prayer in Matthew 9:38: a prayer Jesus prayed and taught his disciples to pray, when he asked the “Lord of the Harvest” to send out workers for the harvest. Sometimes a nudge will lead to conversion, but most often it will lead to a conversation, a confession, a connection, maybe a germination, but always a blessing.

Businesspeople who become entrepreneurs often learn the hard way that constantly chasing home runs will exhaust and bankrupt them. Good business strategists live on base hits. They are ready for a homer should it present itself but are not drawn into the delusive and elusive hunt for the home run. Evangelism is like that; too much emphasis on an evangelistic home run from a nudge is not only unlikely, but also prone to being motivated by impure and selfish motives.

Evangelists always nudge. They travel the Emmaus and Jericho Roads as often as the Damascus and Roman Roads.8 They end up praying, “God is great, God is good” as often as “The Sinner’s Prayer.”9 Their words when spoken are not so much “You are lost in sin” as “You belong to God.” Their attitude is less “Look at what you’re doing! What are you thinking?” than “Look at what God is already doing in you!” Nudgers give attendance more than they take attendance or count attendance. They less tuck people in than rustle them out of their sleeping quarters to awaken to more interesting, more humorous, more unique ways of being. Nudgers leave more tracks than tracts.

All your words were one word: Wakeup.10

—Spanish poet Antonio Machado referencing Jesus

Nudging is more about dialogue than monologue, more Facebooking than blogging. Acts of evangelism intentionally scooch and shimmy people in the direction of truth without the need for knee-bending, beat-my-back altar calls.11 Evangelists nudge the Jesus in people to sit up and take notice. Evangelists are nudgers, not shovers. Whereas evangelism has been known to violate others’ dignity,12 which I call the reproach approach,13 nudgers are not smudgers of the divine in people.

For the past century, evangelism has been built on this one question:

“If you died today, do you know without any doubt that you would wake up in heaven?”

This is supposedly an updating of the evangelism of the eighteenth-century Wesleyan revival, which was mistakenly seen to have been built around:

“Do you desire to escape from the wrath that is to come?”

For the twenty-first century, evangelism will be built on nudges that have more to do with life before death than death and the afterlife, that focus more on the love of Christ than the wrath of God, that worry less about dying than about never having lived.14 Some parts of the church have been slow to speak against the turn-burn evangelism of WOGS (Wrath of God Syndrome), which my friend Vern Hyndman calls “the bad news about the good news.” James chapter 3 is quite clear here: This should not be so. If truth be told, love has always been paramount. In the definitive Wesley hymnbook, of the 525 hymns, only 1 is about hell.15

If you came alive today, would you think you had died and gone to heaven?

If you were offered to live forever, would you want to?

If you really woke up today, could you catch up to what God was doing in your life?

Why the focus more on life than death? The basic biblical distinction is not between “mind” and “matter” or “soul” and “body” but between “spirit” and “flesh.” In one of the most helpful insights into recovering the mind of the Bible I have ever read, Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash reminds us that when the Bible talks about living systems, it distinguishes “between things coming alive, and things crumbling into dust; between not-life, or life-gone-wrong, and life: true life, real life, God’s life and all creation’s life in God.” That’s why the metaphor of wind, or the breath of life, is so important. Only the breath of God can neutralize the closed system of death, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, with the open system of life and the theodynamics of grace.

Whether sent forth from God, breathing all creatures into being, renewing the Earth and filling it with good things; whether whispering gently to Elijah, or making “the oaks to whirl, and [stripping] the forests bare”; or breathing peace on the disciples for the forgiveness of sins—it is one wind, one spirit, which “blows where it wills and we do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” To confess God as Spirit is to tell the story of the world as something, from its beginning to ends end, given to come alive.16

Evangelists nudge people to life. Evangelists nudge people to take deep breaths. Evangelists blow breath into people. I often wonder how the literary career of French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre might have been different if he had been nudged at a time when his faith was trying to take root. But I will let him speak for himself:

I have just related the story of a missed vocation. I needed God. He was given to me. I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: “Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us.”17

Life and death are sometimes in the power of the nudge.

“Nudge evangelism” is based on the following three revolutionary notions (okay, some not so much “revolutionary” as hibernating—but when these “notions” cease logging zzz’s, they will have revolutionary consequences). We will explore these more in depth a little later. But let’s lay them out in full now:

Jesus is alive and active in our world.

Followers of Jesus “know” Jesus well enough to recognize where he is alive and moving in our day.

Evangelists nudge the world to wake up to the alive and acting Jesus and nudge others in the ways God is alive and moving (I call these nudges “small saves”).

I was late to nudging. MSN Messenger first introduced the nudge decades ago, but it was not until I entered the Twitterverse in late 2008 and Facebook in 2009, that I was introduced to the “nudge” and “poke.” The nudge has now even achieved elevated status in the leadership literature with a book by a Harvard law professor and a University of Chicago economist who argue that nudges are a form of “libertarian paternalism” designed to alter “people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”18 In their opinion a nudge is not coercive, but cajoling.19

Even though I hold the E. Stanley Jones Chair of Evangelism at Drew University, I waited to write up my perspectives on evangelism until I had finished two other projects on “default systems.” It’s amazing the unintended messages we send, and defaults are some of the biggest “unintended” nudges in existence. Humans tend to live on autopilot, both as persons and as communities, which is why worshippers tend to sit in the same pew, and students in the same seat.

I am reminded of the mightiness of that default setting every time I approach a toll plaza on the New Jersey turnpike. A lane’s white lines are like the strings of a corset, keeping the car in that configuration even though it would be faster and easier to turn the wheel, cross the line, and get in another lane. There may be twenty cars ahead of you in your lane, but you will sit where you are, ignoring the toll booths with only two or three cars in waiting, because of that mighty default setting.

If we don’t set the correct defaults to faith, our evangelism will be full of sound and fury, but futile. Hence my books on the default interface that connects with a Google world (the EPIC interface)20 and the default operating system that God designed for life and the church (the MRI default).21 We often forget that Satan is an evangelist too. The forces of darkness want nothing more than to recruit people to the ethics of evil and the aesthetics of hell. And the pandemics of terrorism, ritualized violence, environmental degradation, and genocide attest to the success the enemy has had in writing a powerful counternarrative. As Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) says to Batman in The Dark Knight (2008) as they struggle to understand the psychology of the Joker: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” And judging from the seventy million people killed in the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in history, Satan may have been the most successful evangelist of the twentieth century.

Nudges are inevitable. We nudge even when we don’t know it. For example, whenever someone says “most people,” they are nudging you in the direction of conformity. And they don’t even know they are nudging you. Conformism is one of life’s (and evil’s) biggest nudges.

Evangelism as we know it hasn’t worked. Either evangelism is so aggressive you want to get a restraining order, or else evangelism is so restrained you want to call it to order. Our strategies have been spectacularly useless at best, counterproductive at worst. We have lived through an exodus, but not of the biblical kind.

God-guarantees

It’s time to fundamentally change this approach: nudge. Nudge is built on five God-guarantees:

Every person you notice, every person you brush up against, is a child of God, a Jesus-in-you noticer.

Every brush is a bush.

Every best is a blest.

Every worst is a juncture for grace.

Every noticer needs a nudge.

What does this mean?

Human beings are created in the image of God.

God is already present in that person’s life in the form of some burning bush.

The best things about that person are blessings from God.

The worst things about that person are arenas for God’s redemption.

People are hungry for encouragement and love and need help noticing the presence of the divine in their lives.

Nudge Trudge

Faith coaches and spiritual directors are God’s A Team nudgers. They make a life’s work of carefully and skillfully nudging those who trust them. And these wise and loving mentors have a saying:

Tell them: and if they can’t understand,

Show them: and if they can’t see it,

Do it to them.

There are three forms of nudges that increasingly demand more creativity

from the nudger. These forms become more intimate and loving to the

nudge as they progress.

The trudge formula for nudge evangelism is simple: Start small; scale fast; and live, Jesus, live! Nudge is encapsulated in Jesus’ first postresurrection directive: “Go quickly and tell …”22 To “go” is to move forward and do something, however modest: “Start small.” To be “quick” is to use momentum to “scale fast.” To “tell” is to lift up the name of Jesus, tell the good news that everyone has the potential to become a different kind of person, and with our ancestors, “speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.”

A brick wall is … essentially

an aggregation of small effects.23

—Alec Clifton-Taylor

1. Start Small

Nudging is made up of small things, but it is no small thing. Small inputs can have massive consequences. It is less that “everything matters” than that small things matter everywhere. No moment is too small, no person is too small, to gently steer and move people down life paths and away from death valleys. Nudgers encourage first steps, small steps, and are open to the surprise of giant leaps forward.

One of the most distinguishing features of Jesus’ teaching was precisely in this notion that from tiny beginnings God’s reign grows. The ancient Hebrews compared God’s workings to the monstrous cedars of Lebanon and wings of eagles. Jesus loves looking at mustard seeds, grains of wheat, leftover crumbs, and barnyard hens. He invites us to look around at our fields, our gardens, our orchards, our vineyards, our backyards. Jesus is not against large but invites us to start small and do little large. “Little is much if God is in it.”24

It would be hard to overestimate the tremendous power you have to influence the direction of people’s lives, even when that person is a stranger. Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”25 The world has been changed by one word here, one story there, metaphors above and over all. It is not just that “a word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”26 A nudge here, a nudge there are like baskets of blessings that pop out just when you need them the most to give life a burst.

In the animal kingdom, the bigger the brain, the smaller the face. We big-brained people do not know our face, who we are, and how severely we have been defaced from our original divine design. In the words of William Golding, whose book Lord of the Flies (1954) was inspired by his wartime experiences, anyone who could not see that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.”27 In small, everyday ways, evangelists nudge out of others their original human face and what God is doing to summon them to become new human beings called to renew human society. The more I discover what I am, the more miserable I get; the more I discover who God is and who God made me, the happier I become.

In the Jesus kingdom, the bigger the brain in your head, the bigger the love in your heart. And that one-pound heart, made large with love and connected to a two-pound brain, made small by humility, can challenge the world to give peace and love a fighting chance.

To be sure, there is no path through life without detours. But detours, roundabouts, and imperfections, as the incarnation’s setting straight of our sidetracked humanity makes clear, are the paths used by the Spirit to take us home.

2. Scale Fast

Once you have learned the nudge on a small scale, you can leverage and reuse attentional strategies to expand evangelism across every aspect of your life and across your connections.

You know a nudge is providential when the person being nudged already knows they need that very nudge. A nudge is only of value if there is an “aha” moment that accompanies it. Jesus never did anything the Father had not already been doing, and the very instinct to nudge is predicated by a knowledge that God had somehow prepared this very event. The most powerful nudges are those that coax someone in directions they already know they should be going. When a nudger pours fuel at the right moment to a low-grade fire already burning in the heart and mind, the combustion is explosive and the conflagration is breathtaking.

In God nothing is empty of sense … so the conviction of a

transcendental meaning in all things seeks to formulate itself.28

—Dutch historian Johan Huizinga

To the ears of faith, we are never out of the range of God’s voice: every distress a call, every surprise a service, every relationship a blessing, every phone call a connection, every hesitation or doubt a direction. We respond to each of these, trusting that our small saves will make a saving difference even if we never know how it all plays out or how it all works in God’s scheme of things. Most often we never know “the rest of the story.”

But we don’t need to. What counts in evangelism is not cognition, but recognition. Can we identify the face of Christ when he shows it to us? What is our receptiveness to the Spirit, who appears in others and in one another? Are we able to decipher the playings of the Spirit in others’ lives? That’s enough. Jesus “appeared” to the Twelve, to Cephas, and to the five hundred; and Paul says, “He appeared to me.” Has he “appeared” to you? If he “appeared” to you, would you know it? Can you apprehend his appearing?

3. Live, Jesus, Live!

Do we have any faith “to speak of ”?

There comes a time when nudging means a no-beating-about-the-bush stepping forward to meet the other and tell it like it is, or in other words, to tell who Jesus is.

I call dropping the name of Jesus the “Nudge Bomb.” Yet even when we throw the bomb, the nudger seldom throws his or her voice. While slow to speak,29 we are always to be ready to give the “reason” for our high-hope living.30 Jeremiah’s confession about the futility of holding his breath is ours: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary of holding it in; indeed, and I cannot.”31 Our nudges toward lives of freedom and communion and hope will require speaking the name of Jesus and inviting others to accept the liberation that comes with surrender, the communion that comes from submission.

One day a nudger asked a question of John Wesley: “Do you know Jesus Christ?” Even though Wesley was an Oxford don, a theologian, hymn writer, Christian author, and missionary to America, he realized that he really didn’t “know” Jesus Christ in all of these activities like he was being called to know him. What Wesley had been living out of was a Christian faith based more on rational defenses of the cold logic and coherence of the Apostles’ Creed or the Thirty-nine Articles rather than a personal experience of and a heart strangely warmed by the fires at the altar of Jesus the Christ.

Intimate spouses of fifty years know the nuances of their love, the snorts and grunts in sleep, what is normal and what is not. It’s what poet Galway Kinnell calls the “familiar touch of the long married.”32 Do we, after years of walking with Christ, know him and his familiar touch?

In all of our nudges, in all of our helping people see the God who is already at play in their lives, we must never forget that we ultimately do not offer others our skills, our wisdom, or our expertise. We offer others Christ and the Holy Spirit, the only powers that can create the new humanity. Or as the apostle Paul put it, “To me, to live is Christ.”33 Not acknowledging Christ when he appears is dereliction of discipleship.

As you walk down the stairs toward baggage claim at the Memphis Airport, there is a sign that greets you when you land on the ground floor. It is the motto of Graceland. The sign reads: “Discover Your Inner Elvis.” Nudgers help people discover their inner Jesus. Nudgers do that by lifting up Christ, not themselves, and trust Jesus to stir others to new life and new relationships.

Will someone mistake you for Jesus today?

Semiotics 101

For nudge evangelism to work, we must bring together two things seldom seen together: evangelism and semiotics. Since you now have some notion of what I mean by “evangelism,” let me say a word about the more unfamiliar term semiotics.

A teacher walks up to a chalkboard and writes “H2O.” H2O is an abstraction of water. You can’t drink it, be quenched by it, swim in it, or float on it. It’s a useful abstraction. Semiotics is an attempt to get our eyes off the chalkboard and into the real world. It is the art of making connections, linking disparate dots, seeing the relationships between apparently trifling matters, and turning them into metonymic moments.

Most important, semiotics is a Jesus word. In fact, Jesus instructed us to learn semiotics. It’s a direct order.

One of Jesus’ favorite sayings went something like “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight.” He then went on: “You know how to read the signs of the sky. You must also learn how to read the signs of the times.”34 The Greek word for signs is semeia (from which we get the word semiotics). We are directed by Jesus to learn how to read signs, to read “the handwriting on the wall.” God’s hand is still writing on walls today. Evangelists are people with red-sky-at-morning sensitivities.

Hence the yoking of evangelism and semiotics.

The world is ruled by signs, with money the most mastered semiotic system out there. We all do semiotics, whether we know it or not. Waiting on tables is a semiotic system, with every interaction an exchange of visual and verbal markers. At Le Peep restaurant in Peoria, Illinois, my waitress turned to her trainee and said, “See the crumpled-up napkin on his plate? That’s the universal sign of ‘I’m done.’ Take his plate away.”

Some things look easy until you try them (like juggling and jigsaws). Other things look hard until you try them (like semiotics).

Here’s an example. You’ve just purchased a new car. You drive your new car out of the dealership, and as soon as you hit the highway, something happens. The moment your rubber hits the road, something starts to happen. What is it?

You say, “Depreciation.” How true. You’ve just lost three thousand dollars, at minimum. I call the smell of a new car the most expensive cologne in the universe. Lasts about a month. You do the math: three thousand dollars divided by thirty days.… By the way, scientists now tell us that the smell of a new car is toxic.

But something else happens as well. You begin to see that car you just purchased everywhere. Am I right or what?

I don’t think people are now buying that car to copy you. Nothing has changed except one thing: Because of your investment in that car, you are now in a state of “semiotic awareness.”

And when people observe you and your car, they are also in a state of semiotic awareness whether they know it or not. In the land of semiotics, cars are driven less to get you somewhere and more to be seen and to be read. Cars are identity signals. They are signs of who we are or want to be.

We see what we choose to see, as artists have been telling us for centuries. Michelangelo is said to have remarked that he released David from the marble block he found him in. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through,” confessed Jackson Pollock.35 Artists are simply people with high levels of semiotic awareness.

Most disciples of Jesus are not in a state of semiotic awareness. The church especially is not good at reading signs. Those who are preoccupied with reading signs are looking for one thing only: not signs of our times, but end-times signs, signs of the return of Christ … signs of the latter days and the end of days.

By reading the signs of the times, I am referring to the signs of the Spirit’s activity in the world. Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it could not read the signs: “You did not recognize the time of your visitation.”36 Nudgers are connectors of signs and channelers of their significance. Are you ready for signs? Are you able to read signs?

Nudge is an invitation to move beyond church-centric Christianity to a holistic, omnipresent theology of the signified reign of God. God is, Paul told the Athenians, “not far from any one of us.”37 If God can speak through a burning bush, through plagues of locust, through Balaam’s ass, through Babylon, through blood on doorposts, through Peter, through Judas, through Pilate’s jesting sign hung over the head of our Lord, and through the cross itself, then God can and will speak through art deco architecture, abstract expressionism, classic literature like Virgil’s Aeneid, ass media, disease, Disney, hunger, Twitter, etc. The question is never, “Is God using this?” Rather the question is, “What is my/our invitation upon hearing?”

God meets us everywhere, in a bewildering variety of forms and fashions. Eighteenth-century hymn writer Isaac Watts called John’s book of Revelation “the opera of the apocalypse.”38 We grow giddy over mystic numbers, signs and seals, heraldic beasts and composite beings, but what about the opera of the everyday? The ordinary and mundane? John Updike believed his only duty as a writer was “to describe reality as it had come … to give the mundane its beautiful due.”39 Updike was a brilliant semiotician.

Nudge argues for the triangulation of all three: Scripture, Culture, Spirit. But we walk a tonal tightrope: in touch with the world but in tune with the Spirit through highly pitched souls, with heightened sensitivities that connect to the Scriptures and then to the Spirit and then to the culture.

As we watch for the signs of your kingdom on earth,

we echo the song of the angels in heaven.40

—Eucharistic Prayer F, Common Worship

Why are we fascinated with the CBS network’s CSI franchise? We are transfixed by how investigators can “read” a crime scene. We read anthropologists’ works because they can “read” a culture. We read Dan Brown novels in record-bursting numbers (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol) because of the power and mystique of symbology (the Hollywood name for semiotics) and our interest in the hidden forces at work in people’s lives and in our world.

The ultimate in social as well as spiritual illiteracy is the inability to read the handwriting on the wall. There are many forms of biblical, cultural, and spiritual illiteracy that go beyond not knowing the difference between Melchizedek and Methuselah, or between Dorothy Day and Dorothy Sayers … and Doris Day, for that matter. How many people have been waiting their entire lives for a message from God when they have been staring it in the face all along? How many people are deaf to the dog-whistle voice of the divine that only they are vibed to hear?41

Life without Landlines

To get into “Len’s Lair” (aka, my study), I bend down and step up at the same time, and then pass through a small corridor to enter a totally silent room. I switch on some lights, burn some candles, and wake my computer.

Suddenly, there it is: the world. I’m connected to the far reaches of the planet. On our little island I’ve picked up signals that were there all the time. I have the world at my fingertips. All I need is the right

apparatus, the right wireless card or radio or TV or whatever) that can “connect” me with what was always there but was invisible and unavailable until the receiver was activated.

Think of semiotics as a receiver. We live in an ocean of waves—radio, cell phone, wi-fi, infrared, cosmic. These waves not only surround us; they pass through us and can even penetrate walls. These waves will continue to remain invisible unless there is a receiver that can channel them into forms we can hear and see. That “make me a channel of blessing” stuff? Semiotic awareness at its best.

This book is your wireless card to pick up the signals of transcendence, the immanent transcendent, that are out there but not being downloaded. Semiotics is the art of finding channels and making connections. Evangelism as semiotics is the art of tuning our receivers to the “I AM” channel and setting the controls to receive and transmit transdimensional frequencies. This book is your compass in a world where the magnetic lines of the earth are invisible. These magnetic lines have always been there and are not dependent on our compass. But the compass becomes our means of making visible and interpreting what we cannot see.

Marius von Senden, reviewing every published case of blind people receiving sight over a three-hundred-year period in his classic book Space and Sight (1932), concluded that every newly sighted adult sooner or later comes to a motivation crisis—and that not every patient gets through it.42 There are plenty of people out there who are “seeing but not seeing.” Or to put it another way, too many Christians are walking blind through life when they don’t have to.

Our survival, individual and cultural, depends on our ability

to read and interpret ecologically what our man-made

environments are saying to us and doing to us.43

—Eric McLuhan

Throughout Scripture God uses sign language to communicate relationship: Noah and the rainbow,44 Abraham and circumcision,45 Moses and the Passover blood posts,46 Moses and the exodus cloud/fire pillars,47 Samson and his golden locks,48 shepherds and the manger,49 Jesus and the cross, and even Pilate’s jesting billboard hung over the head of Christ on the cross was a sign.50 The same sign can be different things to different people. The Passover was freedom to the Israelites and death to the Egyptians. The sign Pilate hung over Christ’s head was irony to Pilate, blasphemous to the Jewish religious leaders, and truth to all followers of Christ. The same sign, different meanings. In fact, when Jesus turned water into wine, or fed the five thousand, or raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus didn’t think of what he was doing as a “miracle.” He thought of what he was doing as a sign.

God is still signing us. God’s finger is still writing. We may not be able to read the divine finger because we’ve got our fingers in our ears or are so fixated at the finger pointing to the moon that we can’t see beyond the fingertips. But God’s finger is busy writing in strange and sundry signs, designs, cosigns, and signals.

Everything that surrounds you can give you something.51

—Hungarian photographer André Kertész

I begin every day with what I call my “Bugs Bunny” ritual. Where Bugs Bunny chews his carrot and asks “What’s up, Doc?” I drink my coffee and ask, “What’s up, God?”

In fact, some sign readers are arguing that our very survival as a species depends on our ability to “read the signs.” Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004), argues that the only common denominator behind all cases of collapse is not the destruction of the environment, as serious as that is. It is not economic collapse, as universal as that is. The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

The Problem Is Not with Life

Sometimes my kids come to me and complain: “Daddy, I’m bored.” I tell them, “Sorry. You aren’t bored. You’re having a semiotic breakdown.” They then run to their mother, who rolls her eyes and comforts them with “Don’t worry. Your father is just having one of his semiotic spells. He’ll get over it.”

But I’m right.53 And I’m not going to get over it. When my kids are bored, the problem is not with life. Life is full of wonderful, exciting, and adventurous things. My kids don’t have life fatigue. The problem is not with life. The problem is with them. In a state of semiotic awareness, all of life is bathed in beauty and sacredness. When they get bored, they have entered a state of semiotic breakdown. The fact that many people live boring lives, the fact that many people make so little of their lives is not life’s fault. People are in a state of semiotic breakdown.

Semiotic breakdown is the disconnect from all that is and can be from perceived possibility. Semiotic breakdown has degrees. The lightest of these is simply missing the message and doing nothing in most cases. The most serious is seeing the signs, believing they mean something, but having the wrong interpretation and setting off in a destructive path. The advice of park rangers applies here: If you’re lost, stop. Call for help. Reorient yourself. Find true north. Suicide is the ultimate state of semiotic breakdown.

The world is so full of a number of things

I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.54

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Much of the problem with the church is precisely this. The “ole ship,” as Methodist cofounder Charles Wesley liked to call it, is in a state of semiotic breakdown. The church sees mysterious hieroglyphics all around, but because it cannot read the sign language, it fails to see that these are really Hieroglyphic of holiness.

Without doing our semiotic homework, Christians can only follow trends. We can’t create them. Faith widens the imagination and lengthens the horizons. So why is church so narrow in its imagination, so short in its scope of thinking? Why is the body of Christ not bursting with creativity, but a bastion of boredom?

It is in a state of semiotic breakdown. We are as clueless as to what the Spirit is up to as the critic who dismissed the Beatles when he first heard them as “strictly routine rhythm-and-blues.”55 One of the greatest examples of semiotics in the Scriptures is the story of the wise men, who were probably not “wise men” but Eastern magicians, sorcerers, or diviners (magoi).56 In the Greek New Testament magos means most often “interpreters of dreams” or “experts in astrology.” In other words, sign readers. These “magi” had the imagination to read the signals, register the early intelligence, and risk a long journey so that they got there first. Pagan semioticians got to Jesus before the holy and righteous.

If the inability to read signs is a surefire recipe for failure and extinction, the ability to read signs is now being defined as the key ingredient to success and leadership. Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative has spent years developing a “Great American Business Leaders” database. The project identified and analyzed the accomplishments of some 860 top executives in the twentieth century, and the results are being made known through the writings of two leadership professors: Anthony J. Mayo, the director of the Initiative, and Nitin Nohria, the new dean of Harvard Business School. In the work titled In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century (2005),57 the coauthors distilled tons of data into three leadership archetypes: Mold-Makers, Mold-Breakers, and Mold-Takers (i.e., the entrepreneur, the charismatic, the manager). Whatever their style or “type,” however, there was one ingredient that all shared in common: an outsized “ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived … and to seize on the resulting opportunities.”58

The coauthors call this key leadership trait “contextual intelligence.” In words that appear lifted from the biblical description of the tribe of Issachar (Israel’s resident semioticians, who “knew the times” and “knew what best to do”),59 Mayo and Nohria portray the century’s best leaders as people who understood the forces that defined their eras, and as people who “adapted their enterprises to best respond to those forces.” Both “knowing the times” and “knowing what to do” are what made them leaders: “Contextual intelligence is an underappreciated but all-encompassing differentiator between

success and failure.”60

The inability to read signs helps explain a great deal about the past, the present, and the future. For example, take the rise of Nazism. How did one of the most cultured and Christianized countries in the West succumb to the appeal of Hitler? How did the very culture that brought Christian arts and philosophy to their highest and most luminous levels become responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities in history? Its lack of attentiveness.

A few read the signs: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Martin Niemoller, Joseph Ratzinger Sr., the policeman father of Pope Benedict XVI. But by and large the Christian church in Germany was as sign blind as the cousin of Winston Churchill, Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest- Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry (1878–1949), who after he met Hitler called him “a kindly man with a receding chin and an impressive face.”61

Or to take one more example: The problem with the Iraq war was not so much bad military intelligence, but deficient cultural intelligence. There was very little contextual intelligence of the political, religious, and social culture of Iraq and its diverse peoples (Kurds, Sunnis). A decades-old reliance on relational intelligence was abandoned for satellites that could read license plates from space. Unfortunately, they failed to read the nuances of the population. There is also very little contextual intelligence of the mediated world in which we live. War has a very healthy future, but the future of war is inescapably global and fought not in physical space but in informational space. This is what Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and even the middle-class Iraqi citizen Salam Pax and his “Baghdad Blog,”62 seemed to understand better than the United States.

Whether we know it or not, we all read signs. God is also a sign reader: The bow in the clouds is God’s sign, not to us but to God to remind God that there is a promise in place never again to destroy the earth with a flood.

You do semiotics all the time. In fact, every one of you is a master semiotician. You may not know it, but you are. And I’ll prove it to you one more time.

You can’t get a driver’s license until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of the road. In fact, you are given a test on your semiotic skills at reading road signs.

You can’t balance a checkbook until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of mathematics. You learn the sign language of math.

You can’t get a job until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of a language. You learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or Japanese. You can’t read anything until you learn your semiotics.

Semiotics is the art and science of paying attention. Since evangelism is also the art and science of paying attention, I will argue that evangelism is semiotics. There is another book to be written on the prophetic role of reading the signs or semiotics.63 Nudge argues that a semiotics evangelism is more pay attention than attract attention. The best evangelists are not the attention getters, but attention givers. Yet the most attentive semiotician is hopeless if the sign is read yet misinterpreted. Our quest is to be so filled with the Spirit of God, and to be wearing interpretive Jesus goggles, that we not only notice, but are able to interpret and respond.

Paying Attention

One of the earliest admonitions in life is this: “Pay attention.” One of the hardest things in the world to do is this: “Pay attention.” Nobody attends to attention. People teach us how to think, but not how to pay attention. But paying attention changes your brain, your being, your future. According to some scholars, the root lig in the word religion means “to pay attention.” If so, from its very definition, religion helps us learn to pay attention to people and to life.

Our poets and our artists have understood this better than our theologians. Poet John Ciardi defined human identity in precisely these terms: “We are what we do with our attention.”64 I call Mary Oliver the twentieth century Thoreau. Oliver says, “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the so l exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.” 65 In a poem Oliver says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention.”66 When poet Annie Dillard was asked by Life magazine “What is the meaning of life?” her response was very simple: “Pay attention so that creation need not play to an empty house.”67 “[God] asks nothing but attention,” wrote poet William Butler Yeats.68 Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes calls “extreme attention” the number-one “creative faculty.”69 In fact, Fuentes defines love as “attention. Paying attention to the other person. Opening oneself to attention.”70 “To understand something,” Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti has written, “you have to pay attention, you have to love, and when you love something, the very nature of love is discipline.”71

Prayer is properly not petition,

but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.72

—Iris Murdoch

Prayer is where the Christian tradition attends most often to paying attention. Sixteenth-century Spanish mystic/poet St. John of the Cross said that the heart of prayer is giving “loving attention to God” so that even “when the spiritual person cannot meditate, let him learn to be still in God, fixing his loving attention upon Him.”73 Iris Murdoch, an Irish novelist and philosopher, argued in a quote so rich it needs to be cited twice, “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.”74 In her argument that prayer needs to become less a matter of what we say and more a matter of what we hear, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil liked to say that “prayer is paying attention.”75 Prayer is not getting God to pay attention, but learning to pay attention ourselves to what God is doing. Semiotic praying is listening, listening to God speaking to us now.

I would want to argue with Murdoch and Weil somewhat and say that prayer is what happens when you pay attention fully, when you are at full attention, and your attention always gets God’s attention. Paying attention is a form of surrender. We are always surrendered and surrendering to something, but most of us live in the delusion we are in control. Surrender is a willingness to be open to possibilities we cannot imagine. Control suggests that if we can’t imagine it, it cannot be, and we set about to ensure it.

British novelist and Christian essayist Dorothy L. Sayers in a letter written during World War II expressed her conviction that “we have rather lost sight of the idea that Christianity is supposed to be an interpretation of the universe.”76 The church has done itself a disservice, she argued, by presenting Christianity not as a way of seeing all things but as one competing ideology among many. “Instead of leading us to see God in new and surprising places, it too often has led us to confine God inside our place.”77

There are a few in the theological world who have understood the importance of paying attention. “If I gave my attention to your handiwork, I should become your handiwork,” wrote the English theologian and biblical scholar Austin Farrer, echoing the prophetic vision of William Blake, who believed you become what you behold.78 Of anyone alive, however, British sociologist and theologian David Martin has cried the loudest and made the strongest case for the spiritual life being one of sign language. In words that led directly to the writing of this book, “I suggest we look at Christian faith as a code book for picking up signals of transcendence, and the question is how we are to pick up those signals and interpret the code?”79

But examples like these from the Christian world are exceptions that prove the rule. By and large, the Christian community has taken little notice of what it means to “take notice” and “pay heed.”

Not so for the advertising world, which has made paying attention a science. What is public relations but the business of getting noticed. Umberto Eco defines semiotics in this way: “Semiotics is in principle the

discipline studying everything that can be used in order to lie.”80

Tell someone that they can read the signs of the stock market and in that way become rich, and people will do it in a New York minute. Tell someone that they can read the signs of the Spirit and become spiritually rich, and they yawn and walk away. We are more prone to read signs of someone’s economic and social status than to read signs of the divine at play in people’s lives. We have become experts at reading surface appearances and wonder why the number of what appear to be divine disappearances increases. You cannot serve two Semeia.

But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you;

And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you.

Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you;

And let the fish of the sea declare to you.

Who among all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this,

In whose hand is the life of every living thing,

And the breath of all mankind?

—Job 12:7–10 NASB

We live in an attention-deficit culture more adept at gaining attention than at paying attention, furiously beating bushes that advance our interests while not paying attention to burning bushes that showcase God’s activities.

Joseph Nye Jr. of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government names the “paradox of plenty” as one of the characteristic features of postmodern culture. In his words, “A plenitude of information leads to a poverty of attention.… Those who can distinguish valuable signals from white noise gain power. Editors, filters, and cue givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who can tell us where to focus our attention.” 81 If the future lies with those who can help people “focus attention” and “decode secrets,”82 then the greatest days for evangelism lie in the future. In a world where everyone suffers from attention-deficit disorder, evangelists are people with “Attention Surplus Disorder.”83

Whether attention is the highest goal of education, as some have argued,84 is another conversation. But paying attention is the highest form of opening to life and to God. Unarguably the greatest gift you can give another is your attention, partly because it gets us away from our attentiongetting “myness”85 and places us in a larger attention-giving “youness” and “thereness.” To pay attention means you are no longer the center of attention. Attention givers treat signs as subjects of multisensory study. Attention getters objectify themselves as the ultimate sign.

The greatest gift we can give God is our passionate attention, which as we have seen, is but another name for prayer. God pervades the world through the Spirit, but for most of us we live in a world without regard. The writer of Hebrews even goes so far as to suggest that the key to staying faithful and on track with the Spirit is our attentiveness. “Pay more careful attention … to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”86 “Drift away” is a nautical phrase that beautifully conveys how easy it is for us to stray and go adrift without the focusing of attentiveness.

Our inattentiveness to the world contrasts so sharply to Jesus’ attentiveness to all of creation. Jesus was a “dawn collector”87 who found God’s Spirit in all things, in all aspects of the natural world, both animate

(birds, animals, flowers, seeds) and inanimate (pots, coins), yet showed how we can experience God’s Spirit in ways that are beyond and “beneath language.”88

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even

a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome,

indescribably magnificent world in itself.89

—Henry Miller

Psalm 19 may very well be the greatest song in the Psalter and one of the most magnificent poems in all of literature. We have no evidence of Jesus ever citing it, but both the apostle Paul and John use it to reference Jesus and his mission.90 We shall return to this profound passage and its early elaboration of the connection between voice and vision, or what I call a “sound theology.” But for now let’s pay attention to its declaration of God’s universal disclosure:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day to day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.91

The world is not God, of course, but the incarnation goes all the way down, and the Spirit indwells all that exists. Nothing is without a witness to the divine; everything that exists praises the Creator. If

Christians are not the best at giving voice through art, poetry, and music to these unspoken voices, then something is wrong. We are living ADD lives.

Poet/critic Paul Mariani says it is our lack of imagination that has closed us to an awareness of God in the world.

If the incarnation has indeed occurred, as I believe it has, then the evidence of that central act in human history—when the creator took on our limitations with our bones and flesh—should have consequences that are reverberating down to our own moment—evidence of God’s immanent presence ought to be capable of breaking in on us each day the way air and light and sound do if only we know of what to look and listen for.92

This is part of our humanness: Homo sapiens are literally human knowers. And what are we to “know”? Know God, know each other, and know life. Since the days of cave dwellers, people have buried their

dead with what they would need in the afterlife. We have always known instinctively that there is more. Enter into a relationship with a poem, a painting, a musical composition, a sunrise, a snowflake, a flower—know skunk cabbages in January, crocuses in February, cymbidiums in March, harebells in April, poppies in May, irises in June, cowslips in July, pansies in August, marigolds in September, toadlilies in October, mums in November, dahlias in December. God’s creation is a revelation of divine presence. This is the genius of Christian theology: It radically reconfigures the human conception of the sacred. Nothing is inherently “profane.” It may be profaned by sin; but it is inherently an arena of divine activity and spiritual insight. The locus and focus of biblical theology is the world, not the heavens.

What is the grass?

I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrance designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,

that we may see and remark, and say Whose?93

—Walt Whitman (1855)

Jesus expressed an earthy, semiotic theology by materializing his message through various media, including images, stories, actions (stilled storms, healed limbs), and objects like spit, fig trees, bursting baskets, etc. He was a master semiotician. You might even say that Jesus’ ministry was more a semiotics ministry than a preaching, teaching, or healing ministry. Instead of taking stands, Jesus took hikes during which he performed signs: like the coin with Caesar’s image stamped on it, or the overturned money

changers’ tables, or the water-into-wine at small-town Cana of Galilee. Significantly, Jesus’ “first sign” interceded not to sober up the party, but to make it more festive with 600 to 900 bonus bottles of vintage wine. Jesus’ public entry into Jerusalem was a masterful use of signs: a donkey, not a dressed-up horse, as you would expect of a king. The ultimate sign that reveals Jesus as the life-giving Sign? The raising of Lazarus.94

Jesus’ first postresurrection sermon is a sign. Jews raised their right hand to greet one another. The left hand was the dirty hand, the right the clean hand. When raised as a gesture of greeting, it showed that one was not carrying a weapon. Jesus greets his disciples with his right hand. To be sure, he has to walk through walls to get to them. But when he does, he raises his hands and reveals his real weapons: his wounds.

Jesus warns not to become dependent on these signs and rebukes those who get addicted to the signs.95 If you followed Jesus because of the signs he performed, that wasn’t all bad. But you had to move to something deeper. The ultimate sign was not a performing Messiah, but a participating people in the Messiah’s death and resurrection.96 The only sign that matters is a participation in the cross and resurrection. And those who follow Jesus without signs are more “blessed” than those who need the signs.97 Fix our eyes on God, the starter and finisher of our faith.98

“What do you mean?” they asked composer Robert Schumann. “I mean this,” he answered and played the piece again. “What do you mean?” they asked Jesus. “I mean this,” he replied; and he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it into fragments, and shared those broken pieces with his disciples. And that piece, and those broken pieces, have been shared in every conceivable setting and played in every known language ever since.

Faith is the gift of reading the signs of the presence of God. The point of reading signs is not the signs themselves, but the Signifier, Jesus the Christ. Jesus is not some floating signifier at the whim of our advertising campaigns or some magnetic personality. Jesus is the ultimate Sign (Semeion—note the

singular)99 of God. The church is a sign of the revelation that Christ is and was. Or as Karl Barth puts it, “The church exists … to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world’s own manner and which contradicts it in a way that is full of promise.”100 That is why the church will always be a sign that will be opposed.101 But as with all good signs, the church points away from itself and toward the triune God. Its message is not “Come to church” but “Come to Christ.”102

Nudge evangelism, or spreading the evangelion (“good news”), is announcing the good sign. I like how Bill Hull puts it: “If I am driving from Seattle to Los Angeles and see a sign that reads, ‘Los Angeles, 400 miles,’ I don’t pull over and sit under the sign. The sign points me to my goal. Signs of God’s manifest presence point me to Christ.”103

Walk with thy fellow-creatures: note the hush

And whispers amongst them. There’s not a spring,

Or leafe but hath his morning hymn. Each bush

And oak knows I am. Canst thou not sing?

…

Birds, beasts, all things

Adore him in their kinds.

Thus all is hurl’d

In sacred hymnes and order, the great chime

And symphony of nature.104

—Henry Vaughan

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

God posts all sorts of billboards and signposts on life’s highway. Human circumstances have divine meaning. This book is designed to help you pay attention to the variety of signs and signals God gives us about what God’s up to and what’s up ahead.

The concept of paying attention is related to the ancient notion of respect, which comes from the Latin respicere, meaning “take account” or “pay attention.” Key to this understanding of respect, however, is a form of observing that implies honoring. In the Latin meaning of respect, by paying attention, you value and honor what you are observing. When we don’t pay attention to what God is doing, we dishonor and devalue him. In everything we do, whether it be reading the Word, hiking in the woods, watching a movie, viewing a painting, we respect God when we ask ourselves this question: “What is God’s invitation here?” By not paying attention to life, we pay God no respect.

When we see all things in God, and refer all things to Him, we

read in common matters superior expressions of meaning.105

—Philosopher William James

That makes Christian semiotics more than awareness or attentiveness, however. That’s Zen semiotics. Christian semiotics enters into the connections between signs and people and God. In other words,

Christian semiotics is attention that leads to intention, attention that leads to transformation and remembrance. An attention that leads to remembrance is called a sacrament. The most sacred signs are called sacraments, and sacraments work through what they say; they impact what they symbolize. Sacraments are celebrations of our attentiveness and sign reading.106 The more attentive you are, the more you will recover as well as discover. The more attentive you are, the more you see Christ in every person and the sacramental nature of all of life.

The practice of evangelism is, in many ways, life itself—being a true human being. It is to pay attention to life and to God. Evangelism is sensational: helping people hear, see, taste, smell, and touch the creativity of God in their lives and the necessity of their response to God’s initiatives. Nudge evangelism is the decipherment of the workings of the Spirit in people’s lives and nudging them in those directions. Evangelism is bringing people into contact with Jesus, who is already there.

In Grandfather’s mind, there could be no separation between

awareness and tracking for they were one in the same thing.107

—Tom Brown Jr., Grandfather (1993)

One of the best-loved stories about Emily Dickinson, perhaps everyone’s favorite nineteenth-century poet, is the time her father rushed to ring the fire bell during dinnertime. The people of the village came running out of their homes, hugging napkins and silverware. “Where’s the fire?” everyone wanted to know.

Emily Dickinson’s father announced there was no fire. Just a beautiful sunset he didn’t want anyone to miss. Hence he rang the bell before it was too late and the sun went down.

The villagers returned to their dining tables, shaking their heads at “that crazy Dickinson man.”108 But should we all not be ringing bells at the beauty of creation? When’s the last time you rang the bell for burning bushes?

The church used to ring bells to call the community together and to announce the beauty of worship about to take place. Now we’re in the bells and whistles business. I shall never forget the first time I attended a Roman Catholic Mass and heard the sanctus bell ring during the “Holy, Holy, Holy” and the sacring bell rung three times at the elevation of the host. I came home and asked my mother what all that bell ringing was about.

She said, “It’s to tell you ‘Christ is alive,’ alive in the bread and wine.”

“But why a bell?” I persisted. Her reason for the bell scared me at the same time it sparked my imagination. As a liturgical explanation it turned out not to be accurate, but it turned me into a lifelong bell ringer. In olden times, she explained, they used to bury people with strings attached to bells above ground, so that if perchance they buried you alive, you could ring the bell when you woke up. When people above ground heard the bell ringing, they would know “He’s alive!” and immediately dig you out. My mother claimed that her grandmother knew someone who had been “saved by the bell.”

Evangelists are bell ringers. We spend our lives digging people out of self-dug graves and ringing bells that say, “Christ is alive; Jesus is real; God’s Spirit is active in your life.” To people buried alive, trapped in tombs and wrapped in grave cloths, we speak Jesus’ words to Lazarus: “Come out.” Even those who are walking zombies can learn to pay attention to God’s presence and movement. An old Methodist hymn says, “I can hear my Savior calling,” and our response is, “Where He leads me I will follow, I’ll go with Him, with Him all the way.”

I have freed a thousand slaves, but I could have freed a

thousand more if they knew they were slaves.109

—Underground railroader Harriet Tubman

At our home on Orcas Island, we like to feed the birds and hummers. This also attracts other less desirable wildlife like squirrels, ferrets, otters, and mice. But you can’t have one without the other. We also like to leave our doors to the deck open, which means that more than a couple of times a summer a bird or hummer will get trapped inside the house.

When this happens, the whole family mobilizes into action, for we know that if we don’t “help” it escape, it will die inside the house, and everyone knows this from personal discoveries of shriveled-up corpses found months later in the most unlikely of places. As soon as the bird or hummer sees one of us approach it, it will fly as fast as it can in the opposite direction, often smashing against a window or upending one of the colorful tumblers that attracted it inside in the first place. So another family member darts in that direction, nudging it from its place of hiding, only to have it fly even harder and faster to another part of the room, refusing to believe that it can’t escape on its own. But wherever it flees, one of us will be there to nudge it toward the open door.

It is not usually until the poor little bird is so exhausted from trying to escape and its body is so crushed and beaten from its fear of our nudges that it can be guided to freedom or cupped in our hands and released. For some birds liberation takes only a few nudges. For other birds more self-reliant or stubborn, it may take an hour and dozens of nudges.

Never once has one of these freed creatures U-turned in flight and bounded back to say thanks. But the Sweet family always feels pride and joy when we work together to nudge a trapped and doomed bird finally toward life and food. Without our lifting that creature in our arms through prodding and nudging and poking and holding, it would have remained trapped and helpless, its fears sentencing itself to death.

Conclusion

Jesus said that our hearts follow whatever we “treasure” or pay attention to.110 In fact, “Pay attention” may have been Jesus’ signature phrase. Every speaker has pet phrases that they use over and over again. Sometimes these phrases are fillers, giving the speaker time to organize what comes next; sometimes these phrases are feeders, pumping new energy and punctuation into the speech; sometimes they become verbal tics … you know? … you know what I mean?

Paul’s signature phrase was “Now!” Jesus’ signature phrase was something that no one really knows how to translate. The King James Version renders it “Verily, verily, I say unto thee!” The NIV translates it “I tell you the truth.” I really like that, because wherever Jesus went, there was truth. We cannot always give “the whole truth,” and sometimes “nothing but the truth” is unkind, but we can always tell “the truth.” Some contend that the most authentic twenty-first-century equivalent would be “Listen up!” I argue that today’s version would be this: “Pay attention.”

I have circled in my Bible every time Jesus says this phrase in the Gospels, and virtually every page is strewn with circles, sometimes five or six. It’s almost as if Jesus couldn’t tell a story or start a saying without reminding his hearers: “Pay attention.”

You are what you pay attention to. No attention, no life. Everything comes to life when you pay attention to it. In a world of inattentiveness, a world that goes largely unregarded, it is the special mission given to humans to bring the world to life. How do we save the world? How do we keep the

world alive? Through loving attention … by “tending and tilling,” naming and cherishing the tiniest part of what God has created.

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come toward me, to meet and be met.111

—Rainer Rilke

Discover More Online

CHECK OUT INTERACTIVES FOR YOUR PERSONAL OR SMALL-GROUP USE AND MUCH MORE ON THE NUDGE WEB SITE: WWW.NUDGETHEBOOK.COM

Lesson 1

God in the Flesh

(JOHN 1—2)

Before you begin …

• Pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal truth and wisdom as you go through this lesson.

• Read John 1—2. This lesson references chapters 1–2 in Be Alive. It will be helpful for you to have your Bible and a copy of the commentary available as you work through this lesson.

Getting Started

From the Commentary

Much as our words reveal to others our hearts and minds, so Jesus Christ is God’s “Word” to reveal His heart and mind to us. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). A word is composed of letters, and Jesus Christ is “Alpha and Omega” (Rev. 1:11), the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. According to Hebrews 1:1–3, Jesus Christ is God’s last Word to mankind, for He is the climax of divine revelation.

—Be Alive, page 20

1. As you read John 1:1–2, what stands out to you about the description of

“the Word”? What does it mean that the Word was “with” God? That the

Word “was” God? How does this opening contrast with that of the other

three gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What does this tell us

about John, the writer of this gospel?

More to Consider: Why do you think John refers to Jesus as “the Son

of God” so many times in his gospel? (See John 1:34, 49; 3:18; 5:25;

10:36; 11:4, 27; 19:7; 20:31.)

2. Choose one verse or phrase from John 1—2 that stands out to you.

This could be something you’re intrigued by, something that makes you

uncomfortable, something that puzzles you, something that resonates with

you, or just something you want to examine further. Write that here.

Going Deeper

From the Commentary

Life is a key theme in John’s gospel; it is used thirty-six times. What are the essentials for human life? There are at least four: light (if the sun went out, everything would die), air, water, and food. Jesus is all of these! He is the Light of Life and the Light of the World (John 8:12). He is the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2). By His Holy Spirit, He gives us the “breath of life” (John 3:8; 20:22), as well as the Water of Life (John 4:10, 13–14; 7:37–39). Finally, Jesus is the Living Bread of Life that came down from heaven (John 6:35ff.). He not only has life and gives life, but He is life (John 14:6).

—Be Alive, page 22

3. As you go through the gospel of John, underline the references to “life.” Why do you think John’s gospel touches on this theme so frequently? How do the themes of “light” and “life” relate to one another in John 1?

From the Commentary

John the Baptist is one of the most important persons in the New Testament. He is mentioned at least eighty-nine times. John had the special privilege of introducing Jesus to the nation of Israel. He also had the difficult task of preparing the nation to receive its Messiah. He called them to repent of their sins and to prove that repentance by being baptized and then living changed lives. John summarized what John the Baptist had to say about Jesus Christ (John 1:15–18).

—Be Alive, page 24

4. What is significant about the gospel writer’s mention of John the Baptist (John 1:6–28)? Why would this have been important to the early believers?

From Today’s World

Although the skepticism of the modern age has diminished their impact, self-proclaimed modern “prophets” continue to speak about the end of the world (or other events) as if they have exclusive insight into “insider information” from a source they often claim is God Himself. Some gain a following as people clamor for wisdom about why the world is in its current state. Whether out of fear or frustration, they look to the so-called prophets for answers.

5. Why are people so fascinated (whether they agree or disagree) with modern prophets? Do you agree that people today are more skeptical about prophets and their reliability? Why or why not? How does today’s culture compare to the culture in which John the Baptist appeared? What does this suggest about the role of prophecy in modern Christianity?

From the Commentary

The people of Israel were familiar with lambs for the sacrifices. At Passover, each family had to have a lamb, and during the year, two lambs a day were sacrificed at the temple altar, plus all the other lambs brought for personal sacrifices. Those lambs were brought by people to people, but here is God’s Lamb, given by God to humankind! Those lambs could not take away sin, but the Lamb of God can take away sin. Those lambs were for Israel alone, but this Lamb would shed His blood for the whole world!

—Be Alive, pages 27–28

6. How might John’s Jewish followers have responded when he announced Jesus as the “Lamb of God”? Why is John the Baptist’s testimony important? How does John’s description of the “Spirit” compare to the coming of the Holy Spirit as recorded in the book of Acts? What does this teach us about the Holy Spirit?

From the Commentary

“We have found the Messiah!” was the witness Andrew gave to Simon. Messiah is a Hebrew word that means “anointed,” and the Greek equivalent is “Christ.” To the Jews, it was the same as “Son of God” (see Matt. 26:63–64; Mark 14:61–62; Luke 22:67–70). In the Old Testament, prophets, priests, and kings were anointed and thereby set apart for special service. Kings were especially called “God’s anointed” (1 Sam. 26:11; Ps. 89:20); so, when the Jews spoke about their Messiah, they were thinking of the king who would come to deliver them and establish the kingdom. There was some confusion among the Jewish teachers as to what the Messiah would do. Some saw Him as a suffering sacrifice (as in Isa. 53), while others saw a splendid king (as in Isa. 9 and 11). Jesus had to explain even to His own followers that the cross had to come before the crown, that He must suffer before He could enter into His glory (Luke 24:13–35).

—Be Alive, page 29

7. Why were the Jews expecting the Messiah to appear as a king? What does this tell us about the culture and circumstance of the Jews at the time? How might the Jewish leaders have received the pronouncement of Jesus as the Messiah? There had been others who claimed messiahship prior to Jesus’ arrival. What argument does John make in chapter 1 to support the fact that Jesus is the One they’ve been waiting for?

From the Commentary

“The third day” means three days after the call of Nathanael (John 1:45–51). Since that was the fourth day

of the week recorded in John (John 1:19, 29, 35, 43), the wedding took place on “the seventh day” of this “new creation week.” Throughout his gospel, John makes it clear that Jesus was on a divine schedule, obeying the will of the Father. Jewish tradition required that virgins be married on a Wednesday, while widows were married on a Thursday. Being the “seventh day” of John’s special week, Jesus would be expected to rest, just as God rested on the seventh day (Gen. 2:1–3). But sin had interrupted God’s Sabbath rest, and it was necessary for both the Father and the Son to work (John 5:17; 9:4). In fact, John recorded two specific miracles that Jesus deliberately performed on Sabbath days (John 5; 9). At this wedding, we see Jesus in three different roles: the Guest, the Son, and the Host.

—Be Alive, pages 35–36

8. Read John 2:1–11. Why do you think the Scriptures record this as Jesus’ first miracle? What is the significance of turning water into wine? Of the timing of the miracle?

More to Consider: Moses’ first miracle was a plague—turning water into blood (Ex. 7:19ff.), which speaks of judgment. How does Jesus’ first miracle speak of grace?

From the Commentary

Jesus revealed His zeal for God first of all by cleansing the temple (John 2:13–17). The priests had established a lucrative business of exchanging foreign money for Jewish currency and also selling the animals needed for the sacrifices. No doubt, this “religious market” began as a convenience for the Jews who came long distances to worship in the temple, but in due time the “convenience” became a business, not a ministry. The tragedy is that this business was carried on in the court of the Gentiles in the temple, the place where the Jews should have been meeting the Gentiles and telling them about the one true God. Any Gentile searching for truth would not likely find it among the religious merchants in the temple.

—Be Alive, page 41

9. Why was Jesus so upset about the money changers? (See John 2:12–16.) What is significant about Jesus’ comment in verse 19? How does this foreshadowing help us to see God’s divine timetable for Jesus’ earthly work?

From the Commentary

While in Jerusalem for the Passover, Jesus performed miracles that are not given in detail in any of the Gospels. It must have been these signs that especially attracted Nicodemus (John 3:2). Because of the miracles, many people professed to believe in Him, but Jesus did not accept their profession. No matter what the people themselves said or others said about them. He did not accept human testimony.

—Be Alive, page 44

10. Why didn’t Jesus accept human testimony? What does John mean when he writes, “He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man” (2:25)? What does this say about Jesus’ feelings toward those who followed Him because of His miracles?

Looking Inward

Take a moment to reflect on all that you’ve explored thus far in this study of John 1—2. Review your notes and answers and think about how each of these things matters in your life today.

Tips for Small Groups: To get the most out of this section, form pairs or trios and have group members take turns answering these questions. Be honest and as open as you can in this discussion, but most of all, be encouraging and supportive of others. Be sensitive to those who are going through particularly difficult times and don’t press for people to speak if they’re uncomfortable doing so.

11. How do you respond to the different descriptions of Jesus in John 1 (the Word, the Lamb, the Son of God)? In what ways does the father/son imagery connect with you? Why is it important for you to know Jesus was God’s Son and not just a prophet sent to preach good news?

12. In what ways do you see your own life as a “light” to those around you? How have others been light to you? What are some ways you’ve struggled to be a light to others? How can the picture of Jesus as the light inspire you to be a light to others?

13. What sort of “Messiah” do you think you’d be hoping for if you were among the Jewish people before and during Jesus’ time? In what ways might you have been pleasantly surprised by the way the Messiah arrived? In what ways might you have been disappointed? How do you see the Messiah’s role in your life today? In what ways is Jesus’ role like that of a king? Of a servant?

Going Forward

14. Think of one or two things that you have learned that you’d like to work on in the coming week. Remember that this is all about quality, not quantity. It’s better to work on one specific area of life and do it well than to work on many and do poorly (or to be so overwhelmed that you simply don’t try). Do you want to know more about John’s description of Jesus as “the Word”? Do you want to better understand the Jews’ expectation about the Messiah? Be specific. Go back through John 1—2 and put a star next to the phrase or verse that is most encouraging to you. Consider memorizing this verse.

Real-Life Application Ideas: John the Baptist contrasts his method of baptism with Jesus’ in 1:26–34. How well do you know your church’s stance on water baptism? Learn what your church teaches on this

important topic. Consider what baptism has meant to you. Or, if you haven’t yet been baptized, consider talking with your pastor about being baptized.

Seeking Help

15. Write a prayer below (or simply pray one in silence), inviting God to work on your mind and heart in those areas you’ve previously noted. Be honest about your desires and fears.

Notes for Small Groups:

• Look for ways to put into practice the things you wrote in the Going Forward section. Talk with other group members about your ideas and commit to being accountable to one another.

• During the coming week, ask the Holy Spirit to continue to reveal truth to you from what you’ve read and studied.

• Before you start the next lesson, read John 3—4. For more in-depth lesson preparation, read chapters

3–4, “A Matter of Life and Death” and “The Bad Samaritan,” in Be Alive.