Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love

by Thomas A. Tarrants

  The board’s decision was unusual. Whatever qualifications one might expect for president of the institute, former terrorist and ex-convict were probably not among them. And given the financial condition, the critical role of the president in raising money, and my dislike for fund-raising, it made no sense at all. Yet at fifty-two years old, I committed at least the next ten years of my life to this ministry, which did much of its work quietly, serving area churches, pastors, and individuals. In time, this work would fulfill my dream of serving in a ministry focused on discipleship training and spiritual mentoring that would help strengthen the church. And it would turn out to be very compatible with my studies, though it would take a good deal longer to complete them and graduate.

  When I started at the institute, the situation looked hopeless from a human perspective. It was just me and the former president, and our monthly donations were barely enough to pay the bills. I had never done anything like this before and was in over my head. I needed to pray a lot and to trust God to show us what he wanted to do and to provide what was needed to do it. To see God respond to prayer again and again over the years was inspiring and faith building. And to see him resurrect a ministry that was nearly dead was an incredible privilege. Additional volunteers were drawn to the team, giving much-needed help as we grew, and funding increased. Amazingly, God did all this in spite of that fact that I made plenty of mistakes along the way due to inexperience and ineptitude. It was very much a case of what God said to Paul, “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). To compensate in areas where I was weak or deficient, God brought new staff with strong gifts and experience.

  As I pondered why the Lord was doing this, I knew it wasn’t because of us. I concluded that because of God’s intention to restore authentic discipleship to his beleaguered church, he was raising up ministries like ours and others for that purpose. From one office in the Washington, DC, area, we have grown to seventeen cities in the United States and four other countries—and we are still growing.

  Some surprises are good, but others are not so good. One day I got a phone call from Frank Watts. Our friendship had deepened over the years through periodic visits, phone calls, and walking together through the illness and death of his wife, Joyce, and the tragic death of his youngest son, at whose memorial service I had officiated. Frank told me he had cancer and asked for prayer support. Our phone calls became more frequent.

  As his condition worsened, I made a trip to see him, one we both knew would be the last. I returned to Washington, DC, with a heavy heart. On his final day in this world, Frank called again. He was weak, and we didn’t really talk much except to say that we loved each other and looked forward to seeing each other again in heaven. We prayed together and thanked God for our friendship. Then we said our goodbyes. It was a hard and very sad moment, but we both knew that death was not the final word and that there was a glorious future ahead.

  * * *

  Through my work at the institute, I have occasionally spoken to groups about how God brought me to him. The most surprising event in all my years of public speaking occurred one night in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, in 2007. I had been invited to speak at a midweek dinner at Springhill Presbyterian Church. As I was finishing my remarks, delivered in the church fellowship hall, a man in the audience stood up and identified himself as one of the Jewish boys I had roughed up and threatened when I was in high school. The church audience went dead silent. The tension was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife.

  While everyone held their breath, Stan recounted for the entire audience how one day as we were passing in a hall between classes, I said to him, “You bastard kike!” And then he blurted, “You grabbed me by the throat, threw me up against the wall, and looked into my eyes with a hatred that burned bright and told me, ‘The next time I see you, I am going to kill you.’” He related how he had struggled with fear, anger, hatred, and loathing for more than forty years. He recounted that a few weeks earlier, during Yom Kippur, he was praying hard for forgiveness of his sins, and my name came to his mind. He felt that he was being directed to forgive me and also to ask my forgiveness for hating me for more than forty years.

  Then he walked toward me and said, “That is what I have come here tonight to do—to tell you that I forgive you, and to ask you to forgive me.”

  It was a very courageous act.

  People at their tables were stunned. I was stunned. I stepped forward to meet him, and we shook hands and embraced. I told him I was sorry, assured him of my forgiveness, and asked him to forgive me. The barriers were broken down, and we began a new chapter in life.

  Whose sin was greater, mine or his? Mine, of course, for creating the offense. But the good news is that God provided atonement for all of our sins through Christ’s death on the cross, an atonement freely offered to everyone! And God can bring reconciliation between people no matter how far apart they may be. No matter how deeply we have sinned, no matter how much of a mess we have made of our lives, God invites us to turn to him and receive forgiveness and a new life through Jesus, his Son. There is no sin too great for God to forgive, no bondage too hard for him to break, no problem too difficult for him to solve. As Corrie ten Boom, who survived a Nazi death camp, said so well, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”1

  I had been at the institute about twelve years when God interrupted my routines with an unexpected turn of events. In the midst of a very full work schedule, Derek, a young Chinese man I was mentoring in our C. S. Lewis Fellows program, asked me to preach at his church, where he was part of the leadership team. It was a congregation of young professionals, about half of whom were Chinese and the other half Korean, and nearly all were between twenty-two and thirty-two years old. He had asked me before, but I had declined, thinking I would be out of place in an Asian American church. My only exposure to Asian people had been on a mission trip to Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China back in the 1980s. But the invitation this time was different. His pastor had left to start a church in another state, and they needed a guest preacher on short notice. After praying about it, I agreed, not sure of what I was getting myself into.

  Sometimes God calls us to leave our comfort zones because he wants to take us somewhere that’s even better. That was the case here. After the first sermon, they asked me to preach for two more weeks. I was so busy that I should have said no. But they were zealous for God, hungry for his Word, and eager to serve him. They were also very friendly, winsome, and easy to love. The combination was irresistible, and I agreed.

  Then they asked me to preach each Sunday for two months in order to give them enough time to interview the final candidates for the new pastor position. This was a much more challenging request. Preparing an expository sermon each week for that long was nearly impossible, because it would require at least fifteen to twenty hours of preparation. But they were a praying church and promised to intercede for me. To my amazement and great delight, I found that I was able to prepare a good sermon each week, even though it took every waking moment of the week outside of my daily work schedule.

  As the two months drew to a close, the pastoral search committee said they needed more time. They asked if I would consider serving as interim pastor until they could find the right person to serve as their next pastor. If the two-month stretch made no sense, this made even less. But these guys had grown on me. I loved them and didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. As I served there month after month, I found myself loving these brothers and sisters more and more and getting more involved in their needs—pastoral care, counseling, baptisms, and so on. Somehow, by God’s grace, it all worked. What had seemed unthinkable at the beginning turned out to be a much-needed help to the church and one of the best times of ministry in my life, and the bonds of love and affection have continued.

  * * *

  The God of the Bible is a God of purpose and planning. He doesn’t do things in a random or haphazard way. He is the greates
t strategic master planner in the universe. And he especially likes to save and transform “nobodies” and use them for his glory. The prophet Amos was a farmer and herdsman. Jesus’ first disciples, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, were fishermen—good, solid, blue-collar people. Before meeting Christ, the apostle Paul was a violent religious extremist. Augustine was a sex-addicted intellectual. Francis of Assisi was a rich playboy with no purpose in life. More recently, Chuck Colson was a ruthless Washington lawyer and political operative. These better-known examples stand out, but the bigger story is the countless nobodies over the centuries who are not recorded in the history books but were deeply changed by God’s grace and became faithful servants of Jesus in their time.

  I can see something of God’s purposes in saving a nobody like me and leading me the way he has over the years. He had specific purposes and plans for my life, as he does for each of his children, and he calls us to step into them in faith and watch him work. As we do, our life stories turn out to be not so much about us as about God and his amazing grace.

  In hindsight, I can see how at least part of his plan so far has been to deliver me from cheap grace and the racist, anti-Semitic ideology and political extremism that had ensnared me; and give me a passion for true grace, authentic discipleship, and living a life of love for God and others. I can also see that the ministry opportunities he has given me and the seemingly random relationships that have come into my life actually have an inner coherence and purpose. They have been chances to quietly love others and demonstrate the reconciling power of the gospel. And this is what he wants all believers to do.

  When we embrace God’s purposes and plans with the obedience of faith, he is glorified, and we are blessed. When we ignore or reject them, we suffer loss. One of the great keys to a blessed life is to fully surrender to God, ask him to fulfill his purposes for our lives, follow where he leads, and to keep on surrendering and following to our life’s end.

  We will not always get it right. Certainly, I haven’t. My sins and stupidities testify against me. But God is not a demanding taskmaster; he is a loving and gracious Father who forgives and restores those who repent and return to him. He also gives us new chances to embrace his purposes and plans for our lives. He’s the God of the second chance, the third chance, and many more.

  CONCLUSION

  The Challenge We Face Today

  We live in troubled times. The swirling vortex of social and political change afoot reminds me in some ways of the 1960s, leading me to a deepening concern about our racial, ethnic, and political divisions. These are serious social issues in their own right, but also serious discipleship issues for the church.

  How Christians respond to these issues has major implications for the wider world and for the church. To respond properly, we must resist fear, anger, confusion, and hopelessness, and instead look to God in hope because nothing is impossible with him. And we must cry out to him in faith to do great and mighty things in our day, just as he has done in difficult times in the past.

  Some may wonder why I say that racial, ethnic, and political divisions are serious discipleship issues for the church. It is because these issues (and a good many others) are actually symptoms of a deeper underlying problem in our personal and corporate lives as believers. That problem is the failure to live as Jesus calls us to live—under his total lordship over our lives. Unless we deal with this foundational issue—and its application to these concerns—we will continue to go around in circles.

  I want to focus on how believers can face today’s challenges in a way that is faithful to Jesus and glorifies God. I am not a political person and do not write about these things with a political agenda. Rather, I am someone who is trying to follow Jesus as best I can and who writes through the lens of his understanding of the Bible. The fundamental issue here is one of loving our neighbors as Jesus calls us to do. My hope is that this effort will encourage other followers of Jesus to think clearly and biblically about these issues and to publicly demonstrate the life-changing power of his gospel. If we do, God will be honored and people will be drawn to consider Christ’s claims.

  For this to happen, we must recognize that love and its fruits are absolutely essential for any credibility with the watching world. As Francis Schaeffer wrote, after admonishing believers to study issues and give honest answers, “After we have done our best to communicate to a lost world, still we must never forget that the final apologetic which Jesus gave is the observable love of true Christians for true Christians.”1 If we do not love one another, how can we expect the world to take us and the Savior we proclaim seriously?

  Sadly, Christians are not generally noted for such love in today’s world. Nor are we especially noted for loving nonbelievers. Of course, there have been times when Christians have been known for their joyful love for one another and their compassionate care for the lost, and this has had a powerful impact. As Sheldon Vanauken observed, “The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”2 To that list, we might also add, “when they are seduced by racial and ethnic prejudice and extreme political ideology (whether left or right).”

  If we are to recover our credibility as witnesses of Christ, we must first recover our love. How can we do so? First and foremost, we must answer the summons of Jesus Christ, who calls us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33), regardless of the cost (Mark 8:34–38, Luke 14:25–33).3 God wants our wholehearted devotion and obedience; he wants to be supreme in our lives.

  What does that look like? Jesus summed it up in the great commandment: love God supremely and love others sacrificially (Matt. 22:34–40). The first part is rooted in a desire to please the One who loves us and takes the form of grateful obedience to God for his grace and love in our lives. The second part takes the form of servant love for fellow believers, nonbelievers, and even enemies (Matt. 5:43–48). This mandate reaches across all the barriers that separate people—including race, ethnicity, culture, social class, economics, political convictions, and other allegiances. Yet given our current context, it is especially important to look at the implications for the great commandment in three particular areas: race, ethnicity, and political polarization.

  Racial Harmony

  When Jesus ministered to the Samaritan woman at the well, he demonstrated the call to love people across racial and religious barriers (John 4:1–42). We can say this because the Samaritans were a mixed race with unorthodox beliefs.4 Jesus made this call even clearer in the parable of the Good Samaritan. John Stott noted, “The main point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is its racial twist. It is not just that neighbor love ignores racial and national barriers, but that in Jesus’ story, the Samaritan did for a Jew what no Jew would ever have dreamed of doing for a Samaritan.”5 Jesus makes this even more explicit in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20), when he sends out his followers to make disciples of “all nations.” (In the Greek, panta ta ethne means every ethnic group, all the peoples of the earth.)

  Racial and ethnic division and conflict is found worldwide. In America the well-known conflict between white and black people has a long and tragic history. And Christians, as well as nonbelievers, have been a part of this history. Many white Christians have been blind to our sinful attitudes toward people of other races, notably black people, and have failed to love them as Jesus taught us to do. And we have failed grievously in areas like slavery and Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement.

  The broader context of these failures among Christians is the subversion of biblical faith to culture, a subversion continuously at work all around us (and has been since the fall). When you combine that with our self-seeking, fallen nature (the flesh), the schemes of the devil, and the low level of s
piritual transformation in most believers, you have a recipe for real trouble.

  In terms of race, consider the ease with which we absorb and perpetuate racial attitudes of parents, families, and the sub-cultures in which we grow up. We do this unconsciously, for those attitudes are simply part of the air we breathe. When those attitudes are godly, this can be good and positive. But when they are not—when they are shaped by powerful, unrecognized values of the fallen world—we end up with a very different story. Such worldly values and attitudes can shape us, our churches, institutions, and the social structures in which we live (which is a longer discussion). They can also distort our understanding of the Bible and its demands upon us by coloring our reading of the scriptures with lenses that filter out the things we don’t want to see or deal with or that conflict at a deeper level with unrecognized presuppositions. And when these dynamics dominate a church, pastors can be reluctant to challenge blindness and sin for fear of precipitating a church split or losing their job—or simply as a result of not knowing how to deal with the fallout in a redemptive way. These are just a few of the factors feeding the racial blindness that has been and continues to be passed down from generation to generation.

  Recognizing and addressing these things is not as easy as we might think. We all have blind spots, and we are also much less logical and consistent than we like to imagine. And many of these things are so baked into our lives that it doesn’t occur to us to examine them in any significant way. We can also be quite resistant to self-knowledge that challenges deeply entrenched issues we don’t want to deal with. To a great extent, we are creatures of our times and culture. But there is hope—and a way out—as we will see ahead.