All posts by Don Stephens

I'm a musician, teacher, and "sheepdog" with a passion for the Kingdom of God. Currently I work with Youth With a Mission, traveling, investing in young people, and teaching Worldview and the Kingdom of God.
Worldview & Truth

Why I am a Christian

4 Comments

Eight years ago I wrote a piece entitled “Why I Am A Christian” that generated a lot of response at the time. Now eight years further along the journey, I’ve revised it for those who may have missed it the first time.

I am a Christian because the Biblical story offers the most complete and workable answers to life’s most enduring questions: “Where did we come from?” “Why are we here?” “What’s wrong with the world, and how can it be fixed?” “Why do I love beauty?” “Why do I have a passion for justice?”  While the Darwinists, the Marxists, and the Postmodern intellectuals wrestle to make sense of the world, the Biblical record quietly assembles the pieces into a storyline that offers a full accounting of life and existence. No other worldview even comes close.

I’m a believer because Biblical Christianity produces beautiful and enduring fruit. I’m not talking so much about religion, or the institutionalized church, but Kingdom Christianity as practiced by the early church, and small groups of faithful believers over the centuries. No other worldview has built so many hospitals, fed so many poor, emancipated as many slaves, or established so many organizations to serve, educate, heal, and bless the human race as the true followers of Christ, who recognize that “inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, my brothers, you did it unto me.”

I am a Christian because creation itself demonstrates a wondrous order that points to a loving Creator. Not only is the hand of God evident in the miraculous intricacies of animal instincts, hearing and sight, reproduction, the seasons, the water cycle, and the natural laws of nature, but man and animal alike exhibit a capacity for love and relationship that could never have arisen out of an impersonal time-chance worldview.  It’s just impossible for me to believe that dead matter could somehow spring into life, organize itself into DNA and living systems, become self-conscious, and write a symphonic masterpiece, apart from the work of a personal God.

I am a follower of Jesus because the Biblical worldview offers the best and most enduring foundation for a civilized society.  It’s no accident that without exception the most stable, democratic, prosperous, and technologically advanced nations of the world have all find their historic roots springing from the soil of Biblical Christianity.

And finally I am a follower of Christ because of the deeply personal way God meets me in everyday life; because of the way he steps into my darkness,  despair and separation with a redemptive love and quiet assurance  that I am not alone.

As the years of my life pile up, the certainty of my soul deepens into the experience of C.S. Lewis, who so aptly expressed, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; Not only because I see it, but because by it I see all things.

News & Stories

Hospitality in Lebanon

2 Comments

I’ve written about hospitality before, and how it’s the doorway into the Kingdom.  The first thing you notice about Jesus is way he honored people and welcomed them into his presence.

Last week in DaMour, Lebanon I experienced a level of hospitality deeper than anything I’ve ever seen.  In a classroom of  Syrian, Lebanese, Armenian, Brazilian, and American Believers, I was made to feel like a visiting dignitary.  They didn’t even want me to fill my own water glass from the tap.  The honor and respect these students extended to each other, along with their shiny smiles, was a compelling reflection of the Kingdom.  It was my first time teaching in the Middle East, and I sure hope it won’t be the last.

Now I’m in Budapest with a happy group of American and Canadian students.  I had the worst travel experience of my life on the flight from Beirut when we got diverted and then stranded in Izmir, Turkey, for ten excruciating hours.  But that story will have to wait until another time.  It was a maddening example of a worldview that values control over relationship, almost the exact opposite of my experience in Lebanon.   And to make matters worse, the airline lost my luggage.  So here I am with only the clothes on my back.

Thanks to all of you who have been praying for my Mom.  She’s at home “taking it easy.”

The Kingdom

The problem with a vacuum

4 Comments

“The Kingdom is God’s total answer to man’s total need.”
– E. Stanley Jones

With each opportunity to teach the Kingdom I become increasingly convinced of two things:  That the Kingdom is God’s answer to every human need, and that the church’s abandonment of the kingdom is the single greatest tragedy of modern times.

  • Is the problem poverty?  The kingdom is the answer.
  • Is the problem crime?  The kingdom is the answer.
  • Is the problem hopelessness?  The Kingdom is the answer.
  • Is the problem greed?  War?  Racism?  Broken families?  Government corruption? The kingdom is the answer.

As long as the church holds forth the kingdom as the great plan of the ages, mankind has a hope, a plan, and a light to illuminate every problem.  But when the church replaced “Thy kingdom come” with “Come quickly Lord” a vacuum ensued that sent history into chaos.

And nature, of course, abhors a vacuum.   We abandoned kingdom hope and fell into despair.  We abandoned kingdom compassion and opened the way to Marxism.   We stepped away from the arts and funneled our gifts into self-entertainment, (“Christian concerts”, “Christian films”, and “Christian music”), to  discover decency had fled our theaters and concert halls.   We forgot the Kingdom call to steward nature and are reaping an environment that is strained and abused by consumerism and neglect.  We deserted God’s government of the heart, (love, generosity, conscience, and personal responsibility), and inherited a behemoth state that strains to regulate everything from the words we use to the light bulbs we buy.

The way out of our mess is exactly as it was in Jesus day: to repent and embrace the kingdom, to seek the kingdom, to pray for the kingdom, and to make the kingdom our daily priority and pearl of great price.

The Kingdom

Banging our heads against reality

6 Comments

“If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows – the only food that any possible universe can ever grow – then we must starve eternally.”  – C.S. Lewis  (The Problem of Pain)

A crazy number of my friends are finding themselves in the agonizing process of watching their children walk down the road of ruin.  These are good parents who did the best they knew, and yet somehow it’s all turned out so terribly wrong.

It’s made me think about how reality is wrapped up in God and in His Kingdom.  When we turn our back on the Father we walk away from the world as it is.   A person cannot simultaneously resist God and embrace life because they are wrapped so tightly together.  To resist God is to resist purpose, health, joy and relationship.  Such a choice will yield loneliness, addiction and mental illness as surely as jumping into a fire will produce pain.

God doesn’t punish modern day prodigals any more than the Father punished his prodigal son.  The choice is its own punishment.   Sons and daughters weren’t made for pigsties nor brier patches, and when we abandon the Father’s outrageous love to live in the land of illusion it is we who thrash ourselves.

We were made for a kingdom.  My hope is that when the children have had their fill of living against nature, the Kingdom will beckon their feet back into the land of the living.

Autumn Woods

This is what it looks like right now in my part of the country.  Friday (Oct. 16) I leave to teach for two weeks in Kona Hawaii.  There I’ll be seeing a different kind of glory reflecting yet another facet of the beauty of God.

The Kingdom, The Love of God

The keys to passion

5 Comments

After church this past Sunday an old friend visiting in the morning service, caught me with tears in her eyes and said, “I don’t know what it was, but something broke free inside of me this morning as I watched you playing the piano with such joy and and passion.” Passion connects.  God’s Spirit inhabits it and reminds us that we were born for passion. 

One delightful work of the Spirit in my heart these recent years could be described as a rebirth of passion. There was a deadening middle-period in my adult life when I trudged on for nearly a decade without ever shedding a tear. I remember when it was a regular thing to beg God for an unleashing of my emotions.  Now – they ambush me at the most random times. And along with tears has come a surprising ability to feel, move, shout, dance, cheer, and celebrate with an abandon I never could have imagined. 

It’s made me wonder about the change. How did I come to this point, and what brought me here? First off I no longer feel like an orphan before God. I’ve had a deep and lasting revelation of the outrageous love of the Father towards me. He not only loves me, but He likes me. And He has adopted me into the shared life of the Father Son and Spirit. Orphans, I understand have often bankrupted their emotions in the process of yearning for belonging, intimacy and family. But now that I know I belong, the wells of my passion have been restored.

The second thing, I believe, is that I’ve come to understand the Kingdom. And the Kingdom means everything matters. I no longer have to sort through my days wondering what components of my life interest my Father, and which ones go beyond his scope of caring. He fills it all and brings meaning to everything from playing music to making breakfast, from blogging to biking. I’m no longer enslaved to a tightfisted life of religion, but I’ve been emancipated to soar in a world bursting with the presence and passion of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

I posted this years ago, but it bears repeating.  George Target writes in regard to religion’s affect on the sons of Adam,

They don’t smoke, but neither do they breathe fresh air very deeply.

They don’t drink wine, but neither do they enjoy lemonade;

They don’t swear, but neither do they enjoy magnificent words;

Neither poetry nor prayer.

They don’t gamble, but neither do they take much chance on God;

They don’t look at women and girls with lust in their hearts,
But neither do they roll breathless with love and laughter,
Naked under the sun of high Summer.

It’s all rather pale and round-shouldered, The great Prince lying in prison.

If any of this sounds too familiar, I pray that you, too will experience a jaw-dropping sense of belonging to the Father, Son, and Spirit, and a staggering revelation of how the Kingdom brings meaning to even the mundane things of life.

News & Stories

Praying for the victims

1 Comment

Lets be praying for victims of the tsunami in Samoa, the earthquake in Indonesia, and now the typhoon in the Philippines.   If you’re like me, it’s easy to become passive to the growing litany of tragedies in the news and to just skip over to the next article of the day.  But these are priceless human beings with dreams and families and who bear the image of God.   Remember, too, that organizations like World Vision, Food for the Hungry and others are already on site and asking for help.

The Kingdom

Receiving the kingdom, part 3

7 Comments

After a short diversion, (due to my concern over the deep political fracture in America), I want to pick up with ideas about receiving the kingdom.  Just this week I had another friend say, “OK… so how do we actually do it?”

Just a quick review of the first two steps, and we’ll move on:

  • Receive the Love of God, and stop trying to earn it.  Nobody in the Gospel record ever had to earn the love of Jesus.  He simply accepted people as they were.  It’s when we finally accept the outrageous love of the Father without condition by faith that we’re born again into his life.
  • Repent: which means not just turning from sin, but actually rethinking everything we thought we knew about God, his world, ourselves and the human race.   No one can receive the kingdom while clinging to his own human reasoning, religious notions, and cherished opinions.

The next step of the journey seems to be following the King. Have you ever noticed how Jesus invites people to follow him, refers to those followers as “disciples,” and never once labels them “converts”?  “Convert” is one of those terms we evangelicals would be hard-pressed to drop from our vocabulary.  And yet its an idea the Son himself managed to splendidly avoid except for one time when he was taking the pharisees to task for traveling over land and sea to make a “convert.”   Jesus was obviously more concerned about people actually following him as disciples than offering them a one-time religious experience.

To follow Jesus means to become a “red-letter” Christian, one who actually heeds his words, and follows him into the wide-open adventure of turning the other cheek, laying down our lives, giving away riches, feeding the poor, casting out demons and healing the sick.  This is the life Jesus seemed to have in mind when he spoke about his kingdom.

Sadly, we evangelicals often make Christianity a personal affair, a transaction where we exchange “personal” faith for a “personal” experience that’s supposed to insure us a “personal” place in heaven while we too-often duck-out on the kingdom every chance along the way.  I don’t know how God will do his accounting, but I worry that the safety we find in our “born-again conversion” might sometimes lead us away from the main point, which is the red-letter Kingdom of God.

Blog 5

Poetry and Prayers

Tolerance or honor

3 Comments

Tolerate: to allow the existence of without interference; to accept or endure with forbearance.

The architects of political correctness lecture us daily on our civic duty of tolerating those who are different.  They might just as well say “Put up with people.  Endure them.  Allow them to exist.” What a loaded crock of doomed advice.   That kind of begrudging cultural consensus is sure to land us in the rubbish bin of history.  Can anyone seriously imagine a society enduring for even one generation on the sagely foundation of “allowing the existence” of its neighbors?

As a Kingdom disciple God is calling me to a higher and infinitely more delightful position of loving others, honoring them, and considering them better than myself.

  • Do not act out of selfish ambition or conceit, but with humility think of others as being better than yourselves. (Phil 2:3)
  • Show honor to everyone. Keep on loving the brothers, fearing God, and honoring the king. (1 Pet. 2:17)

It seems important in today’s cultural and political climate to shore up relationships with those around us lest the world we know disintegrates under our feet.   I’m choosing to categorically reject mere tolerance for the higher call of honoring others as the image-bearers of God.  To recognize the Imago Dei, (the image of God), in another is to embrace civility, honor, compassion, and respect.   It feels like we could use a bit more of that in the world.

Poetry and Prayers

In defense of racism, nazism, communism, liberalism and all the other “isms”

4 Comments

I think we all need a time out.   When the mudslinging escalates to the point where we’ve become judge, jury, and executioner of our neighbor based on his political convictions even the “isms” get misused and vilified.  Words like “socialism”, “racism”, “Communism”, and “Nazism” are not for angry children who stomp and scream at each other, but for civil people who converse with one another about ideas.   When “isms” become aspersions and conversations become altercations it’s time to take a deep breath, remember the words of Jesus*, and spend an evening watching the Lord of the Flies.

My friend may have socialist ideas.  He may disagree with me on everything from health care reform to czars, deficits, and ACORN.  He may disdain everything I hold dear and blaspheme God himself.  But the One who created him loves him with an unearthly passion and trusts me with the high honor of putting  words and actions to His love

I am determined to walk in love, to consider all evidence, and talk in peaceful, rational tones.   Will you join me?

  • Judge not, that ye be not judged. (Matt. 7:1)
  • Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;  (Matt. 5:44)
  • Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. (Luke 11:17)
Worldview & Truth

Different crowd, different worldview, different results

1 Comment

Normally I would hesitate to point this out as a matter of manners, but I can’t resist this stunning example of how worldview makes a difference.  The first photo is a shot of the Capital Mall after the January 20th inauguration.  The Second is a photo following the Tea Party on September 12th.  You can draw your own conclusions.  (Thanks to sweetness-light.com for the photos)

Inauguration A Nation GathersTea Party2