NILS VON KALM reflects on his long walk with Jesus…
Melbourne, Australia
I’m currently listening to Rachel Held Evans’ last book, Inspired. It’s about her relationship with the Bible, how, growing up in a deeply fundamentalist evangelical environment gave her a literal view of the Bible where nothing was to be questioned. She then goes on to describe how her growing list of questions kept nagging her and how she eventually fell in love with the Bible again.
Listening to the book in the car made me think of why I still believe after all these years. I was brought up to believe. I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church and went to a Baptist Sunday School. I just always assumed that God was there. I never really questioned it.
A long journey in Christ. PICTURE: Jon Tyson/Unsplash
So, when, as a 15-year-old, my Sunday School teacher asked me if I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour, I just said, “yeah” as if, “what’s the big deal? I’ve always believed”. But then he looked at me with a huge smile on his face, overjoyed, shook my hand and told me I’d made a fantastic decision. I honestly didn’t know what all the fuss was about.
Then, a couple of weeks later, another older Christian at the church, who had also taught me Sunday School in the past, told me that he’d heard that I had ‘made a commitment’ recently. I thought, ‘Yeah, I suppose I had’.
“Clearly I had done something pretty significant. So, being a kid who always wanted to do the right thing, I supposed that I had better start reading the Bible. And that’s when it started to make a difference. “
Clearly I had done something pretty significant. So, being a kid who always wanted to do the right thing, I supposed that I had better start reading the Bible.
And that’s when it started to make a difference.
I started reading Proverbs where it talks about wisdom and insight. It blew me away. This was what I had been looking for all my young life. An insecure teenager, unsure of who he was, suddenly had this wisdom that he could live by.
Over the next year, the situation in my home worsened as my parents started arguing every day. During that year I went through one of those programs where you read the Bible in a year. So, I was reading it against the backdrop of my home situation, and the heaviness and tension of that.
Passages about hope within suffering spoke directly to me, piercing my heart and lodging deep within. One passage that had a major impact, and is still a favourite, was Revelation 21:1-5 where it says there will come a day when there will be no more tears and no more pain. It filled me with hope. This sadness wasn’t going to last forever.
Over the next five or six years my faith grew and then waned as I became disillusioned about the nature of love. My home situation contributed largely to that. I went through a phase where I didn’t like God but I loved Jesus. Seeing them as different was a result of what I had been taught about God and that was ingrained into me.
I was also taught the traditional evangelical view of the Christian life, that that was the only way to be a real Christian. Catholics weren’t real Christians, those in the ecumenical movement were wishy-washy, theologians weren’t much better, and of course the Pope was the Antichrist. The Bible was to be taken literally, so I believed in a six-day creation, that we were in the End Times and the Rapture was going to happen in my lifetime. I was convinced of that.
Today, about 35 years later, I remain a strong follower of Jesus, but I don’t believe a lot of what I believed back then. I’ve experienced doubt, but I’ve never been able to let go of Jesus. I still believe He is who He says He is in the Gospels: the Son of God, God in the flesh, and that He physically died and rose from death.
Why do I still believe after all these years? I find that Jesus still fascinates me. There is a line in the original Ben Hur movie where some of Ben Hur’s friends come back from hearing the Sermon on the Mount, and one of them exclaims of Jesus, “He speaks words of life”. For me, Jesus is still life, still the One who gives me meaning and a purpose to live a certain way.
There are certain questions which I can’t get around if it wasn’t for Jesus. He speaks to the human condition. He said the greatest thing in life is to love God and love our neighbour.
Whether people believe or not, love is the ultimate thing we all search for in life. I think that, deep down, we all know that love is the centre of life, the centre of existence. The singer, Sheila Walsh, sang years ago, “Love me, love me, is the human cry. Love me, love me, never say goodbye”. And when we commit ourselves to a life of love, we find that we are happiest.
When I look at the world around me and see such affluence in my country of Australia, yet also such extreme anxiety, loneliness and depression within the affluence, I hear the words of Jesus say from 2,000 years ago, “life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” and “what will it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your very self?”. These are words of wisdom spoken by a man who lived them.
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I also cannot let go of the brilliant explanation by John Stott, who explained how Jesus made the most outrageous claims about Himself, yet never came across as a megalomaniac or a deceiver. How can someone say such outrageous things about himself, yet still be the most loving and courageous person who has changed the lives of billions throughout the ages. As Bono of U2 exclaimed when asked if we can really believe all this outrageous stuff about Jesus, “well, the alternative is that billions of people have had their lives turned upside down by a madman. Now that’s outrageous!”.
There is so much more. Why is sex so pleasurable? Why is it that the very act that continues existence on this planet is so intensely pleasurable? It’s like it was meant to be that way, to encourage us to go and procreate. Like whoever designed it wanted life to go on and on into the far distant future. And wanted us to get unbelievable enjoyment out of doing it!
Why is it that people of all faiths and no faith, just about universally believe that caring for each other is the best way to live life? That, when we hear of someone who have their life for others, we wish there were more people like that?
This is where CS Lewis’ point is relevant; that if nothing fully satisfies us in this life, then it’s more than likely that we were made for something more.
The great paradox of life is what we see in Jesus: we die to win, we surrender to gain victory, we give ourselves away to receive. This is why the message of a crucified Messiah was just completely absurd in the world of the Roman Empire, but that it still changed the lives of millions to the point that that very empire collapsed in on itself whereas the message of that Messiah still changes the lives of people 2,000 years later.
The first letter of John in the New Testament says that the ultimate source of existence is love. God is love. Three small words, yet there has never been a statement so profound.
As Brian Zahnd says, “Love is the ground of being, and existence only makes sense when seen through the lens of love.”
This is the essence of life and it’s why, despite my confusion, pain and weakness, I’m still fascinated by Jesus after all these years.
