John Killinger First air date January 2, 2000 – Program #4306

—————————————————————————- —-

Dr. JOHN KILLINGER has had a distinguished and varied career in the ministry, serving as a pastor, a seminary professor, and the prolific author of more than 50 books. Presently, he serves as President of the Mission for Biblical Literacy, in Nashville, Tennessee, an organization that promotes the reading of the Bible worldwide. For the past several summers he has served as pastor of the historic Little Stone Church on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, and, when he can find the time, he continues to write books. His newest release is called Preaching the New Millennium.

A friend of mine recently asked, “If you had to choose a single verse of scripture from the entire Bible as a motto for the new millennium, what would it be?” I answered without hesitation, which my wife would tell you is very uncharacteristic of me! “Why, Psalm 51:10, I said: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.'”

Even on reflection, I haven’t been able to come up with a better answer. A new millennium is a wonderful occasion. Oh, I know the dating is arbitrary and the calendar actually shifted to its present form near the end of the first millennium. But there is something so hopeful and encouraging about a new thousand-year period. I feel excited even at the turn of an ordinary year, and I get unusual palpitations at the turn of a decade. But a new century and a new millennium all at once–boy, that’s like having cake and ice cream and Belgian waffles all at the same time!

If you’re like me, you envision yourself differently in the new millennium. You think, I’m going to enjoy a fresh start, a chance to be a new me. And you’ve dreamt up resolutions to carry out in this new era–maybe to lose weight or watch less TV or write your mother more often or go online or even learn to operate your VCR.

I remember something a friend said a few years back. We were playing golf, and he was having the worst game of his life, I think, probably because he was playing with me and I am a terrible golfer. He had sliced his tee shot, topped the next one, hit the following shot into the bunker, spent two strokes getting onto the green, and then three-putted. I was worse. But it was a good day for philosophy.

“You know how to tell a really good golfer?” asked my friend. “The really good golfer is the one who can recover from a bad lie. Say he’s behind in strokes and hits the ball into the bunker on the far side of the green. He doesn’t throw down his club or mentally give up the game. He just hunkers down, concentrates, and hits it out of there, right up to the pin!”

He hunkers down, concentrates, and hits it up to the pin. There’s a lot of good theology in that observation. Apply it to life. We all make some bad shots in life–some really lousy shots. We hit the ball into the rough or the water, and really blow it. Everybody does. Every business manager has an off day and makes some bad deals. Every politician exercises poor judgment at one time or another. Every married person makes a botch of the relationship. Every teacher makes a mistake. Every preacher preaches some truly awful sermons. The important thing, when you know you’ve made a bad start at anything, is not to panic but to hunker down, concentrate, and hit the ball toward the pin.

Not panicking is very important. A friend of mine was a belly-gunner on a bomber in World War II. You know, one of those planes with the bubble on the bottom–I think it was a B-17 or a B-29. The pilot was bringing the plane in on a landing strip on some little island in the Pacific. And just as they were almost down, my friend in the bubble could see that somebody had dug an enormous ditch right across the runway. He said he didn’t have time to do anything but pray that the pilot had seen it to. The plane’s intercom was on, and he heard the pilot’s voice come over it. “Lord, help me not to panic,” the pilot was saying, “Lord, help me not to panic.” And with amazing skill, the pilot managed to hit the runway and bounce the plane across the ditch before rolling to a safe stop. “Lord, help me not to panic.”

That’s not a bad prayer to remember as we address ourselves to this new millennium. We’ve probably done a lot of things in our lives we’re not too proud of. And we’ve failed to do a lot of things that would have put us in better shape for hitting the pin now. But thank God it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start over–not just with a new year or a new decade but with a new century and a new millennium! If we just don’t panic, and if we really assess our situations and see what we have the potential for in the next few years, life can really be wonderful for us.

I expect, if you’re watching a program like this–and I really want to commend 30 Good Minutes for its dedication to such helpful and tasteful programming year after year–you are thinking about the spiritual dimensions of your life in the new millennium. You want your life to be as whole and together and caring as it can be. And you can really relate to that scripture verse I cited earlier, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” You haven’t been all you wanted to be in the old millennium, but with God’s help you have another opportunity in the new millennium. With God’s help, you can really have a clean heart and a right spirit.

That’s what I’m hoping for. I like to imagine that I’m going to be a kinder, gentler soul for the next few years–that I’m going to live with evenness and balance, and think clearly and farsightedly. I hope I’m going to be generous with others, and sensitive and thoughtful. I’d like to be temperate in my addictions, such as food and work and watching television, and feel every day that God and I are in control of my life.

A clean heart and a right spirit–they’re really possible, with God’s help.

For the last few years, I’ve been the summer minister at the Little Stone Church on Mackinac Island, off the coast of Michigan not far from Canada. It’s a beautiful place, and a lot of people like to vacation there. We have a lot of weddings at the Little Stone Church. It’s a very picturesque little chapel on the street leading to the Grand Hotel, and it looks out onto the lake and the big Mackinac Bridge, so people like to get married there and then ride off in a horse-drawn carriage to have their pictures made on a bluff overlooking the lake.

One Saturday, when I had just married a couple and seen them and their friends off from the church, a man and woman came up to me and asked if I would help them renew their wedding vows. I said, “You mean, right now?” They said yes, they’d seen the wedding and got the idea, and they were going to be leaving in a couple of hours and they’d like to resay their vows. I looked at my watch. It was an hour until the next wedding, so I said, “Okay, the candles are still burning at the altar. Come on and we’ll do it.”

I was glad I agreed, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man and woman look more earnestly at one another through their tears than this couple did. I confess the thought crossed my mind that there might have been an infidelity involved, or something else that made the renewal very important. And my intuition was not far off, because later I got a letter from Becky, the wife, explaining why it had been such a meaningful occasion.

Dave and Becky lived on a farm. Several months earlier, they had gone into town to get a part for their tractor. While they were gone, their ten-year-old son Tom had been fooling around with a b-b gun and shot a b-b that ricocheted and struck their fourteen-year-old son Matt in the eye. It didn’t really damage the eye, but it hurt and Matt cried out when the b-b hit him. Tom got very upset about it, but Matt told him it was all right. Matt went out to the barn to feed a calf, and while he was gone Tom, in his guilt and agitation, maybe worrying about what his folks would say, took his dad’s rifle from a closet, inserted a bullet, and killed himself.

“We were only gone forty-five minutes,” said Becky, “but in that forty-five minutes our whole world felt apart.” They grieved and grieved. They couldn’t find any consolation. They had grown up in the church but hadn’t been very religious. In desperation, they began to read the Bible. Then they started to pray. At first, they worried that God would think they were doing this in order to bargain for a chance to see Tom again. But the more they read, the more they realized how much God loved them and wanted to give them peace.

“I hate to say this,” wrote Becky, “because I know it sounds awful. But there have been times when we’ve been so happy that we’ve almost been thankful Tom died in order to bring the rest of us to God.”

As they grew closer and closer to God, and felt their lives being changed in wonderful ways, they wanted to do something to symbolize their new existence. So they gave themselves new names. Dave and Becky and Matt weren’t their real names at all–not their original names. They sold their farm and moved to a new place and took new names–even gave Tom a new name–in order to remember what new people they had become.

After telling me all this, Becky added a P.S. to her letter. “Pastor,” she said, “if you die and get to heaven before Dave and I do, will you do us a favor? Will you look up Tom and tell him his mom and dad and brother are coming and are looking forward to being with him again?”

What do you say to a faith like that, and the change in people’s lives that enables them to live with that kind of tragedy? That’s why they wanted to resay their vow; to make even their marriage new. I almost cry every time I think about it. And then I think about how everything is new when we turn our lives over to God, and how we too can have clean hearts and a new spirit as we enter this new millennium. What was it the Apostle Paul wrote? “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away [and] everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5:17).

A new heart–a new spirit–for a new time. Thank God for the possibility of newness and join me, if you will, in making that your goal for the new era into which we are just beginning to step.

—————————————————————————- —-

Interview with John Killinger Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: John, what a marvelous message you brought us today. It really is food for thought when we think of the challenges that you have given us. You talked about bread for the new millennium. Why don’t we add the rest of the meal, if we may here, by giving us some thoughts going into this new year. You’ve got that marvelous little church up on Mackinac Island. Suppose you could get the Congress and the Senate and all the mayors and all of the governors in there for one time with your congregation. What challenge would you give them for the new millennium?

John Killinger: Wouldn’t that be a preacher’s dream–or nightmare! I don’t know. I think I might start, Floyd, by saying to them, “Shame on you!” Having said that, I might say essentially what I said in the message. The main thing is not to panic but to hunker down and hit the ball again and hit it in the right direction this time. There are so many possibilities for remaking the world in the next thousand years when you think in the last thousand years what changes have been wrought. And I don’t mean just inventions like the airplane and penicillin and the zipper and all the other things that have changed our lives, but the way culture has evolved, the global community now being on the verge of instant communication with every other part of the globe, and the sense of being in touch with the remotest places. There ought to be, it seems to me, a sense of infinite caring going on in the next thousand years so that each of us is more aware of how he or she is a part of the great whole; how everything we do affects the balance of everything else. Be very ecologically minded, meaning that the way we behave affects everything on the whole globe, maybe the whole universe as far as we know. I think I would ask these people who are leaders to begin by being very humble about it, to confess their inability to lead and then seek as much consensus as possible, and help everybody to love one another. We’re in a time when we talk about all this rage: road rage, air rage and there is even grocery rage–when people can’t find what they want or think they are paying too high prices for their groceries. There is also space rage. People feel their space is being invaded by all the people there are in the world. I see people going down the street on our little island on a busy day with their elbows out in a militant position to ward off other people who are going to invade their space.

Brown: Seriously?

Killinger: Oh, yes. Something has got to be done to defuse this as we enter the new millennium. I think part of it is simply learning to be at peace in our skins and to love and to make our lives centers of love by appreciating the world around us instead of being hungry to get ahead, get beyond everybody else, and to out-compete everybody else. If we could just go and feel there are “green pastures” out there and that the Lord of the green pastures is in that place. What a difference it would make in the way we go into the new millennium.

Brown: I think it would be a marvelous message to send to our leaders. Talk to us now about individuals. You say try to make that next shot a good one no matter how many times we get knocked down. In terms of the next one hundred years, instead of the next millennium, if we may, what would be the attitudes going into this next one hundred years as compared with the last one hundred years? Are we a more loving people; are we a more caring people?

Killinger: Yes and no. I think in one sense the crowdedness in metropolitan areas has made people very wary, suspicious and cynical–the person that has four locks on his door to the apartment and that sort of thing. There is this sense that we can’t survive this way and people who are thus threatened are very militant and pugnacious toward others. At the same time, there are those people who see all the things that are changing and the way the world is becoming and still say, “It is very beautiful.” These are the people to follow it seems to me. They are people who’ve learned the secret of living in any kind of world, which is you have to be at peace in your own heart. You have to be with God in your own life and when that happens you’re not trying to win any battles. You’re not trying to get ahead of anybody. You don’t need anything you don’t have. That is part of the “give us this day our daily bread.” You don’t need more than daily bread and when you have that sense of the kingdom inside–the peace, the rule of God in you heart–you don’t need the extra locks on the door. You admire all that the Creator has made.

Brown: I’m going to challenge you with this: give us a prayer to carry us into the new millennium.

Killinger: I don’t think there is any better than the one I talked about from David: “Create in me a clean heart, oh, God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Give me a chance to begin again and not be the kind of furious, acquisitive person I was. Let me be wise now and choose the beautiful things of life. Let me love God, love the world around me, and let this be the greatest time in the history of the world.

Brown: Thank you, Dr. Killinger. What a marvelous message and a wonderful prayer to leave with us.