杨腓力的两本书

杨腓力 (PHILIP YANCEY) 是我最喜欢的基督教作家之一 . 他是一个普通的基督徒 , 为一些基督教报纸杂志撰写专栏和编辑 .

我很早就买了一本他的 PRAY, DOES IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?, 可 09 年底才开始读 , 只是晚上睡前半个小时 , 所以进度很慢 . 后来在图书馆借他的 WHAT’S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE?, 居然要排几个月的长队 , 借来的书当然读得比较快 , 更何况很可能不能续借 . 所以第二本书一个多星期就完成了 , 接着也就顺便把另一本读完 . 这时已是 10 年的春天 .WHAT’S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE? 是杨腓力的第一本书 , 引起很大轰动 , 而 PRAY, DOES IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE 是到 10 年初为止最后出版的一本书 , 我凑巧同时读完这两本 . 从书中可以看到作者本身灵命上的进步 , 更多的领悟和体验 . 现在他出版了又一本新书 , 叫做 :WHAT GOOD IS GOD?

杨腓力在亚特兰大的教会长大 , 那里的教会比较严格 , 注重外在规矩多过内心以及与神的私人关系 . 杨腓力一度因此远离信仰 . 读大学的时候 , 他因内心的疑惑不安 , 常常一个晚溜进教堂去弹琴 , 音乐总能带给他暂时的平静 . 而他却在音乐声中感受到神的恩典 . 重新回到神的身边 . 我喜欢他的描写 :

杨腓力写书不空讲大道理 , 而是提出信仰里人们共有的一些尖锐问题 , 并通过自己的感受 , 体验来剖析讲述 , 同时引用大量真实例子 , 包括伟大的神学家 , 和普通的基督徒 . 因此很有说服力 , 常常从特别的角度给读者以启示 . 他是一个非常聪明 , 敏感 , 有着丰富情感 , 善于思考和语言表达的人 . 我受他的影响很大 .

其实信仰本身就是一个摸索 , 体验 , 领悟的过程 , 而并不是一决定做基督徒了就万事大吉 . 信仰是一生的事 , 抛却旧我 , 那个灵里的新我就是刚出生的婴儿 , 要慢慢长成一个属于天国的成人 . 这一路都有圣灵的帮助和带领 . 杨腓力的书提供了很多不同的教友的经验和体会 , 它们真实 , 感人 , 有时非常出人意料 .

WHAT’S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE? 里我喜欢他开始讲的一个故事 . 有人问一个生活落魄的妓女 , 你为什么不去教会 . 妓女说 , 我已经感觉很不好了 , 难道还要去教会让自己感觉更差吗 ? 杨腓力由此引出教会应该是接受 , 宽容 , 帮助人的地方 , 但是很多时候却成了论断 , 指责人的地方 . 接着他开始讲什么是真正的恩典 .

我很同意 . 因为现今社会 , 很多基督徒并没有真正意识到作为基督徒的意义 , 他们的行为给非基督徒一种感觉 , 就是基督徒很了不起 , 拥有真理 , 所以很看不起别人 , 认为别人都要下地狱 . 其实真正的基督徒是仁爱和宽容的 , 因为爱神 , 而爱世人 , 接受他人 , 帮助他人 , 和他人一起成长 ; 真正的基督徒更清楚自己的罪 , 所以谦卑 , 不断地警醒自己 ; 真正的基督徒不会论断他人 , 因为只有神 , 才有权利审判 .

书的最后杨腓力也写了 , 因为爱神 , 基督徒为这个世界所作的一切 . 我读来非常震撼 , 这些都是真人真事 . 回顾整个历史 , 基督教对社会产生的影响之深令人无法回避 . 不用说在医疗救治和教育上的成就 , 就是民主 , 尊重人权 , 人人平等也是来自基督教的理念 , 今天西方政治体制的理论根基 , 政府为人民服务的理念都是从圣经里来的 .

PRAYER, DOES IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE? 给我的影响更大 . 以前我和多数人一样有祷告的问题 , 比如 : 常常因为忙 , 或者心情起伏不祷告 , 祷告时不能集中精力 , 等等 . 这本书帮助我很多 . 大量的实例让我懂得了祷告的核心意义 , 以及怎样培养自己祷告的能力 .

我喜欢杨腓力说的一些方法 . 比如 : 如果说每天晚上祷告 , 很容易不做 , 如果在日历上写 : 晚上 10 点和神约会 , 一般人就不太容易忘记 . 还有就是应该祷告什么 , 祷告方式该是怎样 ? 他说 , 向神祷告时要说的就是那些你和最亲近的朋友 , 家人都不会说的那些事和心思 , 其实神什么都知道 , 祷告内容并不重要 , 神要的是你愿意和他亲近 , 和他共度一些安静时光 , 以及你愿意与他交流的心 . 因此祷告本身比内容更重要 . 而做这些的时候 , 你和神的关系就愈加亲密 , 你就愈能听到圣灵的声音 , 愈能从他这里汲取爱和力量 . 他举了一个要照顾很多孩子的母亲的例子 , 这位母亲所能做的就是暂时离开她吵闹的孩子们几分钟 , 坐下来和神交流 . 这就够了 .

他的例子里有各种各样的人 , 不同年龄 , 不同经历 , 不同种族 . 总有那么几个 , 和我在某一点上如此相像 , 而那人多年的体会就成为帮助我的良方 . 为此 , 我很感恩 .

读杨腓力的书 , 我享受着人的智慧 , 天赋 , 和神的力量 , 循着他清晰的思维曲线一同前行 , 那一种美妙很难言喻 ; 在书里感受别人的感情 , 挣扎和体验 , 从中领悟到许多 , 给自己的灵命注入生机 , 我只能说 : 与其他基督徒同行的感觉真好 .

相关文章
杨腓力的作品 http://blog.wenxuecity.com/blogview.php?date=201012&postID=19737
基督不使生活变得简单，却使其更复杂 video  http://blog.wenxuecity.com/blogview.php?date=200911&postID=32786

后面附上我摘录的 WHAT’S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE 的一些片段 ( 另一本是自己的 , 所以没有做 :)

I first experienced grace through music. At the Bible college I was attending, I was viewed as a deviant. People would publicly pray for me and ask me if I needed exorcism. I felt harassed, disordered, confused. Doors to the dormitory were locked at night, but fortunately I lived on the first floor. I would climb out the window of my room and sneak into the chapel, which contained a nine-foot Steinway grand piano. In a chapel dark but for a small light by which to read music, I would sit for an hour or so each night and play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes, and Schubert’s impromptus. My own fingers pressed a kind of tactile order onto the world. My mind was confused, my body was confused, the world was confused – but here I sensed a hidden world of beauty, grace, and wonder light as a cloud and startling as a butterfly wing.

Something similar happened in the world of nature. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct,, an invention of fourteenth-century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

I was experiencing ”common grace,” to use the theologians’ term. It is a terrible thing, I found, to be grateful and have no one to thank, to be awed and have no one to worship. Gradually, very gradually, I came back to cast-off faith of my childhood. I had experienced the “drippings of grace.” C.S. Lewis’s term for what awakens deep longing for “a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them. Eventually God gave me eyes to notice the grace around me. I became a writer, I feel certain, in an attempt to reclaim words that had been tarnished by graceless Christians. In my first job, with a Christian magazine, I worked for a kind and wise employer, Harold Myra, who let me work out my faith at my own speed, with no pretense.

For some of my first books I teamed with Dr. Paul Brand, who had spent much of his life in a hot, arid region of South India serving leprosy patients, many of whom belonged to the Untouchable caste. In this most unlikely soil, Brand experienced and conveyed the grace of God. From people such as him, I learned grace by being graced.

I had one last skin to molt on my way toward growth in grace. I came to see that the image of God I had been raised with was woefully incomplete. I came to know a God who is, in the words of the psalmist, “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”

Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to who I was – resentful, wound tight with an anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to become a nourishing culture of that grace.

p.1

A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter – tow years old! –to men interested in kinky sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story. For one thing, it made me legally liable – I’m required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman.

At last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. I will never forget the look of pure, naïve shock that crossed her face. “Church!” she cried. “Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

What struck me about my friend’s story is that women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift? Evidently the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?

P.53

Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, “God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, nor because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.”

p.89

Wrestling with the command to “love your enemies” while being persecuted under Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer finally concluded that it was this very quality of of the “peculiar…the extraordinary, the unusual” that sets a Christian apart from others. Even as he worked to undermine the regime, he followed Jesus’ command to “Pray for those who persecute you.” Bonhoeffer wrote:

“Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God. Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use the persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them… We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves.”

Why did Bonhoeffer strive to love his enemies and pray for his persecutor? He had only one answer: “God loves his enemies – that is the glory of his love, as every follower of Jesus knows.” If God forgave our debts, how can we not do the same?

Again the parable of the unforgiving servant comes to mind. The servant had every right to resent the few dollars his colleague owed him. By the laws of Roman justice, he had the right to throw the colleague into prison. Jesus did not dispute the servant’s personal loss but, rather, set that loss against a master [God] who had already forgiven the servant several million dollars. Only the experience of being forgiven makes it possible for us to forgive.

I have a friend who worked on the staff of Wheaton College for many years, during the course of which he heard several thousand chapel messages. In time most of these faded into a forgettable blur. but a few stood our. In particular he loved retelling the story of Sam Moffat, a professor at Princeton Seminary who had served as a missionary in China. Moffat told the Wheaton students a gripping tale of his flight from Communist pursuers. They seized his house and all his possessions, burned the missionary compound, and killed some of his close friends. Moffat’s own family barely escaped. When he left Chia, Moffat took with him a deep resentment against the followers of Chairman Mao, a resentment that metastasized inside him. Finally, he told the students, he faced a singular crisis of faith. “I realized,” said Moffat, “that if I have no forgiveness for the Communists, then I have no message at all.”

Te gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness. And people write songs with titles like “Amazing Grace” for one reason: grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations. Grace alone melts ungrace.

P 206

The spiritual games we play, many of which begin with the best of motives, can perversely lead us away from God, because they lead us away from grace. Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

P260

…I had been selected as the token evangelical Christian. In addition to Lucinda Robb, the panel included the president of the Disne Channel and Warner Brothers, as well as the president of Wellesley Collegeand Anita Hill’s personal attorney.

To prepare for y talk, I went through the Gospels for guidance, only to be reminded how unpolitical Jesus was. In the words of P.T.Forsyth, “The largest and deepest reference of the Gospel is not to the world or its social problems, but to Eternity and its social obligations.” Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is “God’s man” for the White House. Projection myself back into Jesus’s tim, I had difficulty imaging him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was “God’s man” for the empire.

When my turn came to speak, I said that the man I follow, a Palestinian Jew from the first century, had also been involved in a culture war. He went up against a rigid religious establishment and a pagan empire. The two powers, often at odds, conspired together to eliminate him. His response? Not to fight, but to give his life for these his enemies, and to point to that gift as proof of his love. Among the last words he spoke before death were these: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

After the panel, a television celebrity came up to me whose name every reader would recognize. “I’ve got to tell you, what you said stabbed me right in the heart;” he said, “I was prepared to dislike you because I dislike all right-wingers Christians and I assumed you were one. You can’t imagine the mail I get from right-wingers. I don’t follow Jesus – I’m a Jew But when you told about Jesus forgiving his enemies, I realized how far from that spirit I am. I fight my enemies, especially the right-wingers. I don’t forgive them. I have much to learn from the spirit of Jesus.”

In that celebrity’s life, the slow, steady undertow of grace was at work.

Jesus’ images portray the kingdom as a kind of secret force. Sheep among wolves, treasure hidden in a field, the tiniest seed in the garden, wheat growing among weeds, a pinch of yeast worked into bread dough, a sprinkling of salt on meat – all these hint at a movement that works within society, changing it from the inside out. You do not need a shovelful of salt to preserve a slab of ham; a dusting will suffice.

P 280

The two vagrants were seeing the Eskimo woman through the lens of grace. Where society saw only a bum and a whore, grace saw “a little kid,” a person made in the image of God no matter how defaced that image had become. Christianity has a principle, “Hate the sin but love the sinner,” which is more easily preached than practice. If Christians could simply recover that practice, modeled so exquisitely by Jesus, we would go a long way toward fulfilling our calling as dispensers of God’s grace. For a long time C.S. Lewis reports, he could never understand the hairsplitting distinction between hating a person’s sin and hating the sinner. How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?

But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cure.

P266

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is he one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

As a journalist, I have had the privilege of seeing man wonderful examples of Christians who dispense grace. Unlike political activists, this group does not often make the newspapers. Faithfully they serve, seasoning our culture with the preservative of the gospel. I tremble to imagine what the modern United States would look like without the “salt of the earth” in its midst.

“Never underestimate the power of a minority who cherish the vision of a just and gentle world,” said Robert Bellah. These are the people I wish would come to mind when I ask my airplane seatmates, “What does an evangelical Christian look like?”

I know the hospice movement well, for my wife works in one as a chaplain. I once interviewed Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement, at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London. A social worker and nurse, she was appalled at the way medical staff treated people who were about to die – in essence, ignoring them, as tokens of failure. This attitude offended Saunders as a Christian, for care of the dying has traditionally been one of the church’s seven works of mercy. Since no one would listen to a nurse, she returned to medical school and became a doctor before founding a place where people could come to die with dignity and without pain. Now, hospices exist in forty countries including two thousand in the United States alone – about half of which have a Christian base. Dame Cicely believed from the beginning that Christians offer the best combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual care for people facing death. She holds up hospice care as a glowing alternative to Dr Kevorkian and his “right to die” movement.

I think of the thousands of chapters based on the twelve-step program that meet in church basements, VFW halls, and living rooms all across the nation, any night of the week. The Christians who founded Alcoholics Anonymous faced a choice: whether to make it a restrictively Christian organization or to found it on Christian principles and then set it free. They chose the latter option, and now millions of people in America look to their program – based on dependence on a “Higher Power” and on a supportive community – as a remedy for addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex and food.

I think of Millard Fuller, a millionaire entrepreneur from Alabama who still speaks with a cotton-field twang. Rich but miserable, his marriage on the rocks, he headed to Americus, Georgia, where he fell under the spell of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Community. Before long, Fuller gave away his personal fortune and founded an organization on the simple premise that every person on the planet deserves a decent place to live. Today Habitat fro Humanity enlists thousands of volunteers to build houses all over the world. I once heard Fuller explain his work to a skeptical Jewish woman, “Ma’am, we don’t try to evangelize. You don’t have to be a Christian to live in one of our houses or to help build one. But the fact is, the reason I do what I do, and so many of our volunteers do what they do, is that we ‘re being obedient to Jesus.”

I think of Chuck Colson, imprisoned for his role In Watergate, who emerged with a desire to climb not up, but down. He founded Prison Fellowship, which today operates in almost eighty countries. Families of more than two million U.S. prisoners have received Christmas presents thanks to Colson’s Angle Tree project. Overseas, church members bring pots of stew and loaves of fresh-baked bread to prisoners who would otherwise starve. The Brazilian government even allows Prison Fellowship to oversee a prison run by the Christian inmates themselves. Humaita Prison employs only two staff members and yet has no problems with riots or escapees and has a repeat offender rate of four percent compared to seventy-five percent in the rest of Brazil.

I think of Bill Magee, a plastic surgeon who was shocked to find that I n Third World countries many children go through life with deft palates that never get treated. They cannot smile, and their lips curl open in a constant sneer, making them the object of ridicule. Magee and his wife organized a program called Operation Smile: planeloads of doctors and support personnel travel to places like Vietnam, the Philippines, Kenya, Russia, and the Middle East in order to repair facial deformities. So far, they have operated on more than thirty-six thousand children, leaving behind a legacy of children’s smiles.

I think of medical missionaries I have known in India, especially those who work with leprosy patients. On the scale of ungrace, there is no more abused group of people on earth that leprosy victims who come from the Untouchable cast. You cannot descend any lower. Most of the major advances in the treatment of leprosy have com from Christian missionaries, because they were the only people willing to touch and care for leprosy victims. Thanks largely to the work of these faithful servants, the disease is now fully controllable by drugs, and the chance of contagion is minimal.

I think of Bread for the World, an agency founded by Christians who believed they could best help the hungry not by starting a competitor to World Vision but by lobbying Congress on behalf of the world’s poor. Or of Jose ph’s House, a home for AIDS patients in Washington, D.C. Or of Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing that runs inner-city programs in thirty-five large cities, or of Jerry Falwell’s “Save a Baby Homes” where pregnant women can go to a loving home for support if they choose to carry their babies to term rather than abort – programs that get far less attention than do their founders’ political views.

Rousseau said the church set up an irresolvable loyalty dilemma. How can Christians be good citizens of this world if they are primarily concerned about the next world? The people I have mentioned, and noted, those most conscious of another world have made the most effective Christians in this one.

相关文章
杨腓力的作品 http://blog.wenxuecity.com/blogview.php?date=201012&postID=19737
基督不使生活变得简单，却使其更复杂 video  http://blog.wenxuecity.com/blogview.php?date=200911&postID=32786