Midnight Approaches: Prologue

Over the next two weeks, I will be presenting excerpts from my new book Midnight Approaches: Understanding the Times and Knowing What To Do About Them. Below is the first installment. Please feel free to post comments and thoughts.

Before you begin reading this book, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell you that I’m a ruined man. My life has been turned upside down. After thinking I had everything figured out, my life was totally changed. I’ll never be the same again. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

It all started one Saturday morning a couple of years ago.

May 10, 2008

My wife, Christy, and I walk up a tree lined street and turn to our right. We pass through an old iron gate and into a garden. It is beautiful. There aren’t a lot of flowers. Just a few ancient olive trees scattered around, with a pebble path passing between them. We are actually with a group of about 70 others. The garden is called Gethsemane. It is at the base of the Mount of Olives. And it is here that Jesus made His ultimate decision to deny Himself and take up His cross. The group is having a time of teaching and worship, but I don’t join them. I’m overwhelmed with emotion. So, I sit on a small rock and take out my Bible. I read Matthew 26:36-46. A crack opens up in the very center of my soul and seems to spread throughout my entire being. For a week I’ve been traveling throughout Israel. I’ve been to Galilee. I’ve spent time in Ein Gedi, the Ellah Valley and Masada. And the entire time I’ve been feeling that something just isn’t right. Now, in a garden famous not only for the prayer of my Savior, but for the silence of His Father, that feeling turns into anguish. I come to realize that we have been spending the past week talking almost entirely about what God could do for us, and very little about what we could do for Him. It is here, in the garden, that I see that modern Christianity has lost its focus, and that what Jesus intended for the Church is no longer even visible.

This thought consumes me throughout the rest of my travels in Israel. The contrast is clearly seen in the differences between the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Gordon’s Tomb. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the traditional site of Calvary and the tomb of Jesus. It is ornate. It is covered with a chapel and gold and paintings. People are everywhere. Gordon’s Tomb is a different site that others believe is where Calvary and the tomb could have been. It is quiet. It is simple. It is a place of peace. I remember walking through the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and just wanting to get out of there. Something seemed so overblown and false about it. But Gordon’s Tomb – I could have stayed there all day.

I don’t know which the correct location is. I don’t think it really matters. But the difference between the two illustrates what I believe has happened to the Church. We’ve become so overblown and focused on pomp and circumstance; on programs and memberships; on size and status; on what’s in it for us; that we have lost the meaning. And today, what the world sees makes them want to stay away. I don’t know if I blame them.

In the movie, The Matrix, a mentor-like figure named Morpheus describes the Matrix to his young pupil, Neo, as “a splinter in your mind.” That is what my trip to Israel became to me – a splinter in my mind. A festering nuisance that kept me awake at night. A thought – that we’ve become something we were never intended to be – consumed me. I returned home to Colorado and all I wanted to do was study. Something in my spirit said that I had to go back to the beginning. I needed to reject 2,000 years of church history and focus on the start. What was the original Church like? Who were the original Believers? What did they believe? And, most importantly, what was Jesus really like? What I discovered has forever changed my life.

I began devouring the Word of God. Rather than studying it out of duty, or to prepare for a Bible study or class that I had to teach, I studied the Scriptures simply to learn what they said. Passages that I had read dozens of times took on a completely new meaning. The Word began to unfold a picture that was both exciting and terrifying. I have come to believe that time is short. Our King is coming back. And before that happens, the world is going to see the greatest move of God in the past 2,000 years. However, as His people, we are not prepared for His arrival.

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