#578 THOUGHTS ON MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY A Miracle Speech—73 Years in 20 Minutes!
1 John 1:5-7: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (NRSV).
This passage and the following verses (1:5—2:2) have played a crucial role in my spiritual journey, especially in its more formative years. Verse 7 was the big verse:
if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” [In the last phrase the verb tense could be translated “keeps on cleansing us from all sin.”]
When we retired in 1996 we retired after 35 years of teaching at Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego, California, we spent the next two years, 1996-1998, teaching at European Nazarene Bible College (now EuNC). As a condition of our going there World Missions insisted that we participate in a cultural reorientation week in Kansas City designed to prepare us for the transition from Southern California to southern Germany. .
As a Nebraska born farmer and a Southern California enculturated Yuppie I really needed another week of cultural reorientation before coming to live here! A day or two after our arrival on August 27 I walked over to Quincy Bay, pushed a “walk” button to cross Quincy Shore Drive, but all that happened was a red light!
Here in Quincy I am even afraid to attempt a walk around the block lest I get lost! Back in Nebraska ranch country we found our way by going east, west, north, or south. But here when I ask which direction certain streets run I get a look that says “what a stupid question.” North, South, East and West seem to be irrelevant here. So I can’t figure out why there is a South Shore and a North Shore!
But we are getting enculturated and are enjoying it thoroughly. We feel at home among all of you, and are discovering life here as a significant stage and challenge on our spiritual journey. And that is our assigned topic for this morning, our spiritual journey--73 Years in 20 Minutes!
So I will try to sketch a few brief scenes crucial in my memory that point to the essence of that journey.
1936 (65 years ago)
My mother’s father, Grandpa Gould, was an old fashioned Methodist preacher in small town Nebraska villages. He preached his final sermon at the age of 81, passing away in his sleep two nights later after a hearty supper. When I was around 8 years old he used to take me on his knee and quote to me John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Then he would ask me to repeat it after him inserting my name, “For God so loved . . . “ using my childhood nickname hoping thereby that I would come to a saving faith in God. But I could not do it. There was some kind of inner resistance even at that tender age that kept me from it. The sad thing is that he died in 1945, my senior year in high school, before I did come to faith.
1938 (63 years ago)
My boyhood home was a cattle ranch on the north edge of the Nebraska Sandhills in Cherry County, known as “the home of a million cattle.” In my early years we had no electricity, no phone, no running water, and an outhouse equipped with a Sears & Roebuck catalog! The thirty yards out there from the kitchen door was a real adventure in the dead of winter when a blizzard was on.
The ranch in those days was labor intensive, we used horses on all the field machinery. So my Dad had several hired men who lived in the bunkhouse (where I was born) and Mother had two young women to help her with the cooking for the ten to twelve of us who sat around that big table three times a day with food always piled high!
I think I was around 10 when one evening after all the chores were done I was sitting with the kitchen help at the dining room table around a flickering kerosene lamp. As I was listening to them talk about religious things, a conviction came over me that I was to be a minister. I soon went to my room, knelt by my bed and promised that I would. But I put off any personal commitment to Christ.
Spring 1947 (54 years ago)
In the fall of 1946 at the age of 18 I left the ranch to go to college, to Taylor University in Indiana. My motivation was that anything was better than staying home and feeding cattle in a Nebraska blizzard. But once there I realized that it was probably time to become a Christian. I knew I should sometime, but it was always “not yet”! Like St. Augustine struggling with his sinfulness, “Make me pure, but not now”! And like St. Augustine, I could never get away from the prayers and faith of my saintly Mother.
So in the fall revival I made my way to the altar. But there were no bells and whistles. At Youth Conference on campus in the spring I tried again, but the heavens would not open and the lightening would not strike as I had been led to believe by the testimony of others. But sometime later, alone on campus somewhere in desperation I prayed this prayer, “Ok Lord, I am going to serve you whether you save me or not, so there!”
My Christian life began in dry faith. Reflecting back that is probably the root cause of why the concept of “dark faith” or “the darkness of faith” has come to mean so much to me in the last twenty years of my ministry. This explains too why back in 1979 I became intrigued with Exodus 20:21: “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” (NIV).
My call to ministry was confirmed during those college years and a vague thought of the possibility of teaching began to enter my mind.
1951 (50 years ago)
Between College and Seminary, while serving as the pastor of two Methodist Churches just north of Omaha, Nebraska, we joined the Church of the Nazarene. At that time I was fully convinced of the truth of the Wesleyan holiness message, but quite unconvinced by the way I had heard the Scripture used to support it. One of my major motivations for going on to graduate study in biblical studies was to get the tools and methods to find out for myself precisely how the Scriptures supported our holiness message (a task to which I have given much of my exegetical and writing energies over the years).
Sometime after graduation from Nazarene Theological Seminary in1954, probably while planting a Church of the Nazarene in Kimball, Nebraska, the Lord gave me my text, 1 John 1:7, and seemed to say that if I could just understand it in context it would solve my difficulties with the Church’s message. So I began to write sermons on that text during the next six years, sermons that document my increasing understanding of 1 John 1:7.
Spring 1960 (41 years ago)
Following ordination as a minister in the Church of the Nazarene and graduate work at Princeton Theological Seminary, having been pastor of two Nazarene Churches, in the spring of 1960 I was well into my doctoral program at New College, University of Edinburgh. Due to my broader reading and time to reflect I began to doubt my entire theistic worldview, my basic faith in God. For weeks in my head I was an atheist five days a week, but since I was pastor of the local Nazarene Church, when Saturday came my prayer became, “Oh God, if there be a God, I need help, I must preach tomorrow and feed the saints”!
One afternoon, slowly walking east down Princes Street toward the Church reflecting on these things, all of a sudden I began to realize that I was basing my Christian faith on my ability to find answers to my intellectual questions. And every time I found one satisfactory answer it merely laid the foundation for two even more difficult questions. So finally, talking to myself as I walked, I said, “OK Frank Carver, “Do you believe that there is a God in heaven, the maker and ruler of all things, or do you not? I choose to believe that, Yes! And do you believe that God has revealed himself fully and finally in his Son Jesus Christ, or do you not? Yes, I will believe! And do you accept the claim of this confession on your life from here on? Sure, Why not?” So I did. On that day I based my life once and for all on the deliberate decision “to believe and to follow”! The bottom line of my Christian life!
On that decision I gladly risk it all, the meaning and integrity of the entirety of my life! I am free to work on my intellectual questions as I have time and ability, joyfully and without anxiety! In the meantime I declare my faith in Christ, and I have found it vindicated over and over again in the living of it. I have found no better perspective with which to view the tragic realities of the kind of world we live in, and no better way to face the problems of my own life and family than that found in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God!
Fall 1963 (38 years ago)
By the time we had arrived on the campus of Pasadena College in 1961 to begin our teaching career my quest to understand 1 John 1:7 in relation to my Wesleyan heritage had come to a satisfying conclusion. So I constructed a final sermon on 1 John 1:7, #405, entitled “As He is In the Light” and delivered it three times in November 1963, one of them being in the PC Chapel The outline was simple, but for me profound:
I see Jesus Christ as the LIGHT of God I see my WALK as one of total repentance from all sin I see the sanctified life as a CLEANSING relationship
if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us (keeps on cleansing us) from all sin.”
LIGHT, WALK, CLEANSING—the big words!
Spring 1996 (5 years ago)
Never again did I write a sermon on that text until thirty years later on retirement from PLNC, when I revisited both the text and the sermon and spoke in the PLNC chapel on “How My Heart Has Changed.”
Around 1980, during one of the darkest periods in my life, I made a decision to redig the wells of my devotional life and embark on a Prayer Quest. On that quest my mentors eventually became Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and John of the Cross (1542-1591), sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite monastic reformers. Teresa reinforced for me the primacy of prayer:
Well, believe me; and don’t let anyone deceive you by showing you a road other than that of prayer.
From her and particularly from the writings of John of the Cross, in the words of a contemporary writer, I began to realize in a new way that
In contemplative prayer, the [Holy] Spirit gradually dislodges the “junk” of a lifetime, going back to earliest childhood, the hidden debris of hurts, angers, and resentments that obstruct the inflow of grace at our deepest level.
[Reading from “How My Heart Has Changed, 1966]?
To make a long story short my exposure to John of the Cross has extended for me the possibilities of grace inherent in my Wesleyan heritage. For Saint John the key principle of the spiritual process is that one becomes like what one loves or is attached to. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel (1581—1585) he explains:
an attachment to a creature makes a person equal to that creature; the stronger the attachment, the closer is the likeness to the creature and the greater the equality, for love effects a likeness between the lover and the loved (bold mine).
Contemplative prayer, in his words “a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God”, was at the heart of this deepening spiritual life for John of the Cross. His much quoted definition of contemplation from The Dark Night reads,
For contemplation is nothing else than a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love.
One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings --ah, the sheer grace!
are of the opening poetic lines of The Dark Night (1578 or 1579).
For John of the Cross The Dark Night has to do with that life-long process of spiritual maturation that would appear to follow after what we Wesleyans designate as entire sanctification. This process of continued transformation of Christian life and character accomplished by God alone through the discipline of contemplative prayer leads to what he calls the “perfection of the spiritual life.”
In his witness to contemplative prayer and all that it involves Saint John opens to us the reality of a yet deeper purging, a purging of those anti-Christlike faults that our repentant agonies have been unable to touch in terms of 1 John 1:9 (“If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”), and that reaches even to those faults of which we are as yet totally ignorant!—A most thrilling optimism of grace: As Jesus promised, “in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places”!
This is the grace of the unlimited possibilities of personal transformation! Yet it is a long drawn out and difficult process—so be warned! Thus John of the Cross writes:
this dark night is an inflow of God into the soul, which purges it of its habitual ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual. . . . Through this contemplation God teaches the soul secretly and instructs it in the perfection of love without its doing anything or understanding how this happens.
As interpreted by Albert Outler, Christian perfection for John Wesley was “the fulfillment of faith’s desire to love God above all else and all else in God, so far as conscious will and deliberate action are concerned.”
John of the Cross now leads me to believe that God can lead me beyond my “conscious will and deliberate action” in my “faith’s desire to love God above all else and all else in God.” I now believe in a continuing deeper cleansing of my inner and outer life that only God can do as I dispose myself to the grace of prayer.
if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
Psalm 139 is now a favorite scripture:
O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and rise up: You understand my thought from afar.
You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, You know it all.
You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn, If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, Even there your hand will lead me, And your right hand will lay hold of me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, And the light around me will be night,” Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is a bright as the day, Darkness and light are alike to you. . . . . Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.
October 10, 2001 (Today!)
And now here we are, at Eastern Nazarene College. For my wife Betty and I the call of God to come here was as distinct and convincing as any in our whole lives. We had no desire to put ourselves back into the academic harness with its constant and unyielding deadlines and institutional hassles, for we were retired--and tired! And we were not in the market for a retread! So why we are here? Only God fully knows for sure. So our task is simply to continue to be as prayerful and obedient to God as we know how—and trust him for the strength and wisdom we need to serve him faithfully this year at Eastern Nazarene College! MAY GOD BLESS THIS WORD TO YOUR HEARTS THIS DAY!
ENC Chapel, October 10, 2001. One will be held on this campus November 2-4. November 11, 1963, Church of the Nazarene, Temple City, California. November 21, 1963. Church of the Nazarene, Highland, California. November 22, 1963, Chapel Pasadena College, Pasadena, California. The Way of Perfection, 21. 6. Frank X. Tuoti, Why Not Be a Mystic? 96. The Ascent of 0ount Carmel, 1.4.3. The Dark Night, 1.10.4. Ibid., 1.10.6. John 14:2. The Dark Night, 2.5.1. See 2.13.11. Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 32. Ibid. Omitting verses 13-22. Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24, NASB.
5.1.3 #578 DATE \@ "MM/dd/yy" 10/10/01 TIME \@ "h:mm AM/PM" 6:48 AM PAGE 8
Frank G. Carver