When Julian told me about Ravi Zacharius a while ago I was super annoyed with him. I knew nothing about the story at the time, and I assumed he was repeating rumors or hearsay.
“Allegedly….I’m sure,” I said in response to his report.
“No. Not allegedly. They found proof,” he told me.
I still found it hard to believe even a little bit until I started to do my own research and found the receipts all over the internet.
Wow.
Then RZIM released their own 12-page report.
Woww.
It was the kind of thing you have to just skim over. Cringe-through. Read with fingers covering your eyes.
I’ve listened as the leaders of the Christian community have given their two cents, many of them still reeling and processing themselves.
Jackie Hill Perry has a thread on her twitter I found insightful. At one point she said: “I’m reminded that giftedness will never translate to godliness. Neither is orthodox teaching the proof of righteous living.”
Giftedness will never translate to godliness. I read it 8 times and tucked it away to read tomorrow too.
Kevin Carson wrote an incredible article. Absolutely 100% worth the time it will take you to read it. I chewed on this quote from it all evening:
“In other words, you may be able to describe the great Bible doctrines but not apply them to your heart. Why? You confuse Bible knowledge with maturity, biblical insight with wisdom, and biblical talk with walking in the Spirit.”
Find the article here: https://kevincarson.com/2021/02/12/copy-the-need-and-imperative-of-self-counsel/?fbclid=IwAR36ZWCUjPhCs12R8Rbf6KVaOB8ku6dCabuH_QwA_hgzjCso9UO1wKQGPSE
In my own walk, the heart-work required to sift through all the Ravi Zacharius debris lines up with the path God already had me on.
Here are the three small words, the nutshell, the phrase I’ve been carrying with me, and the warning to all of us in the wake of the RZ discoveries:
Keep. Your. Heart.
The verse is from Proverbs 4:23.
“Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.”
The NIV translation says “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
The words came to me one night after a hard day of work, and a rowdy bunch of kids at bedtime. I was settling in on the couch alone with a late dinner and an aching back. I opened up all the streaming networks on my computer and began to look for something to semi-tune out while I ate my dinner and relaxed.
After 10 minutes of browsing, I realized I was struggling more than usual to find something I could watch. First I was thinking it was because everything is getting so much darker these days, and it’s harder to find something “good.” But then I thought some more about it and I realized that what I was really experiencing was a greater sensitivity to what was already dark, likely because I’ve been spending more time with my Bible and other spiritual disciplines that I was neglecting more before.
I thanked God in passing, for the grace of that. That He still pursues me and brings me back in. That He would take the time to open my eyes to sins or spiritual laziness in my life…But even still:
That night I was so tired.
My fruitless search for something harmless to watch and relax to went on and on and I was getting weary of it.
“I’m just gonna click on something,” I said, giving up on finding something good and ready to dig into my dinner. “I’ll pick the least awful thing I can find.”
My mouse hovered over several shows I’d already passed up because I knew better. And just then, the Spirit gave me a hard, specific nudge.
Keep your heart.
It occurred to me all of a sudden that this is what our spiritual life is made up of. All these moments where we either choose holiness, or we don’t. We are the product of all the things we let in, and every single bit of it either pushes us toward Christ or pulls us away.
I shut my computer and ate in silence.
In Dane Ortland’s book, Gentle and Lowly, he says this about the heart:
“One thing to get straight right from the start is that when the Bible speaks of the heart, whether Old Testament or New, it is not speaking of our emotional life only but of the central animating center of all we do. It is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what we daydream about as we drift off to sleep. It is our motivation headquarters. The heart, in biblical terms, is not part of who we are but the center of who we are.”
The central animating center of all we do.
Our motivation headquarters.
The center of who we are.
This is the part of us we are urged so strongly to guard.
I’m of course always surprised and sad when I hear of some great moral failure of a Christian, whether they’re in the public eye or not. But when people are scratching their heads and going round and round and they “just can’t figure out how so-and-so could do that,” I’m not asking those questions. I actually get it. I can see it. Maybe not the particular sin in question, but I can understand the slippery slopes, and all the small steps that ultimately got them where they are.
I was beguiled once. As a new Christian, I said yes once when I should have said no, and it was a small yes–but it led me to a 7-month spree of rebelling against a God I happened to love and need very badly. Sin deceives. That’s “how so-and-so did that.”
The truth is that we are all a few small yes’s away from a hook getting sunk in too deep to wriggle free. We are shocked and dismayed at Ravi and his sexual misconduct with massage therapists, but aren’t our churches are full of men addicted to pornography? Haven’t many of us or at least some Christian we know spent precious hours given to us by God watching raunchy Netflix shows and chalking graphic sex scenes up as “love scenes”?
And couldn’t we replace the above sexual sins with all manner of other sins that go un-checked in our lives?
“But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” James 1:14-15
My point is that Ravi started somewhere. He didn’t wake up one day after a lifelong journey of godliness and guarding his heart and decide to suddenly grope a young woman or ask for a nude photo.
All our un-checked sins are stepping stones. It doesn’t really matter if anyone sees them or not. They’re taking us somewhere darker than we could imagine.
As Tim Challies said:
“One treasured sin hands Satan just as much power over you as a hundred. As a fowler can hold a bird by one wing, Satan can hold you by just one sin. Just a single sin left in your life is as dangerous as just a single rattlesnake left in your bed.”
A dead, famous, Christian apologist with a big huge asterisk by his name now (“He did great things for the Lord while he was alive **but***”) is a mega-phone message to those of us still on this side of heaven.
Keep your heart.
Get it in check.
Christians, yes, us. We are absolutely prone to wonder, and those sins can absolutely take us that far into the dark if we don’t start making war on them.
I know that people falsely have the idea that because is a person is a Christian they shouldn’t deal with this level of temptation, or that a real Christian isn’t capable of falling that far, taking sin that far.
But it’s not true. The Scriptures of warning in the Bible are directed at Christians, because it is possible.
It’s all there. All the darkness, all the temptation, all the weakness, all the perversion, the trauma, the brokenness— it’s there for Christians too.
The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is that a true Christian believes that that sin damns them to Hell and separates them from God, and that Jesus came down to earth and died as payment for those sins so that we could be cleansed of them, reconciled to God, and ultimately join Him in Heaven one day.
The only reason a true Christian’s life typically looks different is because we’ve been given the wisdom, the boundaries, and the power to live life abundantly through God’s Word and by His Spirit. He gives us what we need to be victorious.
But a Christian can and will go wayward if they’re not being diligent in obeying God’s wisdom, keeping those boundaries He’s given us, and walking in that power He offers us through His Spirit.
The lie the whole world believes is that God gives us rules to keep us from having and doing the things we want. In truth, those rules and boundaries are there to protect us because He knows what sin can do. We, on the other hand, are chronically deceived and destroyed by it.
Everyone I know that was doing the sinful things I used to do before I became a Christian–is hurting. In the areas in my life that I haven’t fully healed or addressed those old sins–I’m hurting. Sin feels good for as long as it feels good but the whole time it is murdering you. Stealing from you, killing you, destroying you.
Dan Paterson, the former head of RZIM in Australia was writing about the Ravi situation on Facebook Wednesday night. He said this:
“I feel a profound sense of the fear of the Lord, knowing that one day I too will give an account, where like the RZ report, everything done under the shroud of darkness will be made known. Jesus comes to restore justice through judgment…”
And that is what I’m feeling, along with countless other Christians I think.
A profound sense of the fear of the Lord. A deep, Spirit-led desire to keep my heart;
to guard it with my life.
Let’s encourage each other in this every chance we get.
Jess Davis 