I Can Learn From What God Is Doing In Ted Haggard/ David Linhart (Cambridge, MA)

My dad doesn't follow Jesus, but he thinks the stuff that Jesus is about is noble. He tells me that gospel values are a nice talk that he never sees anyone walk. I tell him about a teen I know who, at first, didn't bring her son to our church, because in her previous church, she had to keep her pregnancy on the down low. Getting pregnant as an unmarried teen gets you kicked out of some faith circles as a reprobate, or at least marked as a bad influence. For all the talk of Jesus' forgiveness and restoration, and the assurance that he meets us where we are, when an opportunity arises to support God's work through someone's weakness, we balk.

But I told her there's only one way that anyone ever gets a kid-- as a gift from God-- and here we celebrate what God is doing. So bring your son! What type of influence might she be on other teens? She will show them what it looks like to grow up, which some do earlier and some do later. Come to think of it, maybe we never get out of that setting, and we simply trade whose turn it is to be the example of God maturing us. I mean, we look to King David's towering stature in retrospect, not always imagining what it might have been like to live under his leadership:

"WHAT? He did WHAT with Bathsheba while we were out fighting battles and he was supposed to be fighting with us?"

"WHAT? The reason my friends are dying of this horrible plague is because David took a census of Israel when God was against the idea?"

In a career with all kinds of contradictions, the consistent thread was that he kept going back to God, openly, so everyone could see what going to God looks like. His Psalms were not sermons, rather his private prayer life made public. Isn't that the same vulnerability of God revealing himself through Jesus, giving us as much of himself as we can handle? Isn't that why God calls David a man after God's own heart-- a heart that stubbornly insists on being fully known, despite the risks? David's example of purity is predictably a wash, because only Jesus sets that example; but David's example of transparency is timeless.

We can learn from what God is doing in Ted Haggard. If he disappears, an opportunity for the gospel to be lived out will disappear. That opportunity is there whenever anyone messes up, barely or colossally, where the only restoration that is effective is God speaking into our actual, individual lives in real time. I'm talking about restoration as a LIFESTYLE, not just recovery from a tragic episode. It helps to see what that lifestyle looks like, so we can support each other in living it together. But if it all happens behind the scenes until we're cleaned up and presentable, then all that's left is, well, preaching.