Thursday, October 29, 2015

To Tell the Truth

If you’re old like me you remember an ancient TV game show called To Tell the Truth. (Back in the old days before reality TV we had game shows. Those were really real and people won money. Or dishwashers. Or pool tables . . . lots and lots of pool tables.)
Anyway, on TTTT, three people would line up before a panel of four people (who were supposedly famous but we weren’t sure why) and those three people would all say they were someone who had done something interesting . . . and they would all give the same name. Then the panel of sort-of-famous people would take turns questioning the contestants about who they supposedly were until they had to vote on who they thought was really the person they said they were. Then the contestants won money if they convinced the panel they were the person they really weren’t. I think the show should have been called To Tell a Lie.
I love my DVR. It works as a net to stand guard over the TV line-up and snag shows as they air through the week so that I can view them according to my own schedule. When people ask me when or on what channel a certain show airs, I’m totally blank. I just know that at some point it’ll turn up on my DVR. And I’ll sit down and catch up.
A couple of days ago I was catching up on my shows. I watched CBS’s Sunday Morning (the best show on TV these days) and saw the story of the woman who was the girl in the picture taken during the Vietnam War. She was about nine years old and photographed nude, running from a napalm explosion with burns all down her body, the clothes having been burned off her back. The photographer had taken the picture with her running toward him and then thrown down his camera to rescue her.
Jane Pauley interviewed Kim for the show, a woman now fifty-two years old. As she told her story, Kim gave her testimony to the amazing transformative power of Jesus Christ. In the depths of her pain and bitterness as a young woman, she had come across a New Testament Bible and became a Christian. It changed her heart.
I was struck at the openness with which she confessed the name of Jesus. No generalizations. No political correctness. Simply speaking the truth.
A little later I watched one of my favorite sitcoms, Black-ish. I love this show because it breaks down barriers. I know it’s not everyone’s fave, but I love it.
This week’s episode surprised me. Some white friends of the Johnsons (the African American family) invited them to their church. So the Johnson family went. They were surprised the first Sunday at how comfortable they felt; the music was fun and the sermon was lite. When their friends invited them back, they accepted. They did not find it as . . . inspiring? . . . the next week. The music was exactly the same and they wondered if the pastor was stuck on the same analogies.
So they played the “culture card.” That’s right. They told their friends that it was a culture thing . . . that they needed to be in their own culturally specific church. So their friends asked if they could come along to their church the following Sunday.
And they did. They all went to the African American church that the Johnsons usually went to only on Easter and Christmas. For the first time, they experienced “their own” church and it went on and on and on . . . over four hours!
But in wrapping up the show, the Johnsons had a discussion about the overall church experience. They compared it to buying the mattress they were lying on. They hadn’t settled on the first or second mattress they tested; they kept hunting until they found the one that worked for them. Why not do the same thing with church?
Not a spiritual breakthrough. But this? An honest and funny view of Christian church (including a satirical but honest commentary on Jewish identity in the workplace) . . . on network television?
Then I watched an episode of Ellen recorded a few weeks ago when she interviewed Trai Byers of Empire, another show that I enjoy. There in his interview, he boldly gave his Christian testimony. No mincing of words. No downplaying the truth. Honestly glorifying God in heaven for His divine work and thanking Jesus Christ for his grace.
I began to see a pattern.
Our country has a ton of problems. Practically everywhere you look, you can find something wrong that needs fixing. I won’t even start a list here because it would just be the tip of an enormous problem iceberg.
But many people are beginning to recognize the Truth and speak it out: Jesus Christ changes life. When we come to Jesus . . . when we bring him our broken selves . . . we become something—someone—different and we are never more the same.
And it is not because we just decide to be better or try harder. It is because of Jesus.
Makes me think of the Kurt Carr song . . .

Demons have to flee when I say Jesus.
Sickness has to heal when I say Jesus.
Every knee shall bow before
And every tongue proclaim
With worthy praise,
The matchless name of
Jesus!
Something happens when we call Your name . . .
Jesus!
Oh the power in Your name!
When I call upon Your name,
The very atmosphere will have to change.

We’ll be transformed,
We’ll never be the same
By the power of Your holy name . . .
Jesus!

That’s a truth worth telling.


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