Ever feel like God - I mean "the bus" - may never show up?

Janice Agnew and Susan Blevins will be singing a song, Four Days Late, on Sunday morning. The song refers to the account of Lazarus death in John’s gospel chapter 11. Martha & Mary had sent for Jesus, but Jesus waited for two days before He even began the journey to their home in Bethany. When He finally got there Lazarus had been dead for four days…Jesus was four days late, or was He?

Hope that makes you just a little curious for Sunday morning…come out and hear the song and the message.

John Mark Caner, 8, shared his faith with numerous Thai people during a summer mission trip, including these two men from a Hmong village in the northern part of the country. Photo by Aaron A. Goccia.

Posted on Aug 24, 2011 | by Vicky Kaniaru CLEVELAND, Ga. (BP) –

John Mark Caner, age 8, headed to Thailand with one goal in mind — to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, especially with Mr. Wii, a Buddhist monk.

John Mark joined his parents, Emir and Hana, and a 25-member team from Truett-McConnell College who traveled to Thailand on a July 6-25 mission trip. Emir Caner is president of the Baptist-affiliated college in Cleveland, Ga.

John Mark learned of the monk from his parents, who met the Buddhist on a previous mission trip. The youth then rallied some school friends to pray for Wii for the entire year of 2010.

When John Mark and Wii finally met in Chaing Mai, Thailand, the young American asked the monk, who was surrounded by statues of Buddha, “Who do you worship?”

After the obvious answer, John Mark shared with Wii that he was breaking the Lord’s commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

Wii responded to the youth with the Buddhist tenet claiming many paths to God.

John Mark replied with the words of Jesus: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Though Wii didn’t profess faith in Christ, the culmination of personal contact and prayer has fostered a desire in Wii to learn more about Christianity. Wii told Emir Caner of his desire to study the Christian faith among Christians and not Buddhists. Caner offered Wii a semester of study at TMC, and Wii has maintained email contact with the TMC president, telling of his plans to be on campus in the fall of 2012.

“Watching John Mark testify of our Lord and his unconditional love for Buddhists, Muslims, animists — for all people — gave me an even greater passion to share my own faith,” Emir Caner said. “Through his witness, he reminded me of the words of Jesus who said that the key to the Kingdom comes by having the faith of a little one.”

During their trek to Thailand, the mission team also encountered a 95-year-old man who had preached the Gospel in Thailand for 75 years, particularly among members of the Hmong tribe. When the preacher noted that four of the families in his Hmong village were not yet Christians, John Mark jumped at the chance to share the message of Christ with them.

“I loved watching how unafraid he was,” his mother Hana said. “It made me wish I was a kid and didn’t have the barriers of wondering what people will think about me. It was pretty amazing watching him go to the temples and witnessing him tell people about Christ.”

John Mark also distributed tracts and demonstrated an EvangeCube among children, and later shared his Christian testimony with the parents, as he also did at a daycare with kids ranging from preschoolers to teenagers.

“I want to go to Chiang Mai again,” John Mark said. “I also want to witness in Bangkok. After that, I want to go to China. I want people to know God so they can go to heaven and live with God forever.”

From time to time people who know of my appreciation for C. S. Lewis will ask me if I’ve read some recent book about Lewis. I always say the same thing: “No. I don’t read books about C. S. Lewis; I read Lewis.” There is this idea afoot that secondary literature (writings about other writings) is somehow as good as, or even perhaps more valuable than, primary literature (the writings themselves). And so, as a result people read biographies or “studies” of C. S. Lewis, thereby intending to understand his “thought,” rather than going straight to the “horse’s mouth,” so to speak, and reading Lewis’s own writings themselves. “You’ll learn more Plato from the ‘experts’ than by reading the Symposium; you’ll learn more Homer from the textbook on ancient Greek literature than by reading the Odyssey.” I don’t much think so.

I’m sure some of it is merely the result of feelings of inadequacy. “How could I possibly know as much as the experts about Homer or Plato or Lewis?” Some, no doubt, is the result of indolence. It’s easier to let the experts do the hard work and boil it all down to a few “scholarly paragraphs” which can then be lifted and dropped in an appropriate context as if I had done the work myself.

But nowhere is this tendency more pervasive and insidious than in reading the Bible. Years ago, I was teaching at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, and I had gone home to South Florida for a holiday. While I was there, at church one Sunday someone came up to me and, knowing that I was a seminary professor, asked what I thought about Experiencing God (a “Bible study” course popular in the churches at the time). I said: “I don’t have an opinion; I haven’t read it.” The person looked shocked and said: “What do you mean you haven’t read it? Why, I thought that’s what you’d be teaching in the seminary!” Said I, “No, we still teach the Bible in the seminary.”

I’m constantly amazed at the lengths to which Christians will go to avoid reading the Bible, preferring just about any “study” or “exposition” or “inspirational writing” to the Bible. You go to a “Bible study” these days and there is precious little reading or study of the Bible itself going on at all! They’re studying Rick Warren or Beth Moore or whoever is perceived to be “trendy” or “relevant” at the moment. I observe that many, appropriately enough, don’t even call them “Bible studies” anymore. “I’m attending a Beth Moore study.” Precisely. Again, in my judgment the causes are the same: inadequacy and indolence. Some feel inadequate to move into a collection of writings composed in a world and a culture so vastly different from our own, so they look to the “experts” (credentialed or self-styled) to negotiate the distance for them. Others just don’t want to work that hard.

But the real tragedy is that the Bible, when given a chance, is not nearly so inscrutable as many seem to think. If one would just sit down and read a Gospel from beginning to end as one would any other story, the plot, the characters, the setting, and the message come through with surprising clarity. Even Paul’s letters, which Peter said were “difficult to understand” (2 Peter 3:14-16), nonetheless speak with striking relevance across cultures and through centuries when given a chance to speak for themselves.

And so, here’s a novel idea! Why not, at your next Bible study, actually study the Bible, rather than books about the Bible? Leave the “experts” and the “inspirational speakers” standing out in the hall and instead invite Matthew and Paul and John and Luke to your Bible study. Just read the Bible and see if it doesn’t make more sense than all those books about the Bible that are trying to “explain” it to you. I dare you!