Dear Friends:

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road (Mt 2:12).

I shared a written account of my spiritual rebirth with my Mom. She read it through standing in the kitchen of my home.

Mom and Dad took their children to church, sacrificed to send us to church school and college, were faithful in family worship and prayer. They took great pride that I served the Lord and the church they loved as counsel, teacher and college administrator.

Now she was learning that the upbringing, baptism, education, service, and titles notwithstanding, my personal relationship with Jesus Christ began with a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit just a few months before during my 37th year. It staggered her. She took the news as a commentary on defective Christian parenting.

“Surely, we must have done something right?” she asked me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, your father and I tried to give you a good Christian home and to teach you to follow God. Now you say that you didn’t know him until now.”

“Mom,” I said, “this isn’t about you. I am grateful for everything that Dad and you did for me–the values, the worship, prayer, Bible stories, church school, all of it. Those are all building blocks for what I have now. But, Mom, I had to know and experience Christ for myself. You couldn’t do that for me. This is between Christ and me alone. It is personal and nothing and no one else can substitute for him.”

She knew the truth of what I was saying in her head, but I am not sure that she was convinced in her heart. Even Mary and Joseph were challenged by the devotion of Jesus to his heavenly Father. “‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’He said to them, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?’But they did not understand what he said to them” (Lk 2:48-50).

Here’s the problem–Parents, teachers, and preachers take on the burden of our eternal salvation, but they are inadequate to the task. Even though they do their best to teach us what they know, possessing that knowledge at best won’t do more than lengthen our span of years on this earth (Ex 20:12).

Our salvation comes down to the choice you and I personally make with what we know about who we will rely upon for our future and our hope (Ps 62). To draw this to a fine point, Christ is our salvation as well as our savior (Isa 12:2; 1 Cor 1:30-31).

The wise men from the east were intellectuals, educated and well-studied in science and religion. They knew astronomy and the substance and timing of Bible prophecy. When they spotted an unusual star appearing in the west, they related it to an ancient prophesy of the birth of a great ruler of God’s people (Num 24:17).

Prophesy can inspire us to look for Christ and knowledge of Scripture and nature can lead us to him, but what then?  If the wise men had never acted upon the knowledge they possessed, we would never have heard of them. They would have been like the chief priests and scribes who knew the prophesies of the Messiah’s birth place, but failed to go look when word came that the signs of his birth were occurring (Mt 2:4-5).

The wise men acted on their accrued knowledge to look for Jesus. As they drew near, they were able to discern the difference between the king of Israel chosen by God, Jesus, and the king of Israel chosen by the Romans, Herod.

In the face of power, the wise men had humility and the courage to ask what they didn’t know. “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” they asked the despot who claimed to be the king of the Jews (Mt 2:2).

When our experience doesn’t match our convictions born of knowledge, it is only right to question the difference.  True faith questions the disparity between experience and knowledge and will accept neither of them as the final answer. God is only personal to those who desire and seek him above and beyond where they are now (Heb 11:6,13-16). It would be a terrible thing to miss out on eternal life because we took someone else’s word for it instead of knowing God for ourselves.

Herod’s palpable fear and lack of an answer was telling. Despite his ostensible authority, he called a committee meeting which is a common tactic of a politician seeking to buy time and avoid personal accountability. He called the wise men to a secret meeting and asked them for the exact time that the star had appeared in an effort to manipulate their knowledge for his purposes.

Even as Herod told them that Bethlehem was the location they were seeking, the power politician sought to subvert the mission of the scholars by telling them to go and report back to him on their findings. The wise men heard him out and moved on.

Outside the palace, above all the scheming and hypocrisy, shone the star that had brought them this far. The light that ignites our yearning for Christ is the one to follow whatever digressions and diversions tempt us. The star led the wise men to Christ.

They were “overwhelmed by joy” on arrival (Mt 2:10). This was much more than simply their happiness at reaching their goal. Joy is the emotion evoked by the experience of great pleasure and delight. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit that rises in the presence of the Lord regardless of what other circumstances are present (Hab 3:17-18). A gospel song describes the gift– “this joy that I have, the world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away.”

These were men of great learning, discipline and reputation, but in the presence of the infant Jesus they knelt in reverence and worshiped. They yielded their hearts and opened their treasure chests to him.

One or more of them had a dream that warned them to avoid Herod. They heeded the Holy Spirit and changed direction. The wise men returned home by another road.

The resolution of this story might be profoundly disturbing to those who demand that their religion be rational, doctrinal and well-ordered and nothing more. Reading signs in a star, being overwhelmed by joy, kneeling in a stable to worship an infant, and taking guidance from a dream would likely draw conservative suspicion as excessively emotional or “new age spirituality.” It would, that is, if the event hadn’t occurred 2,000 years ago and had long since attained the gravitas of tradition and scriptural authority.

We tend to lay out our spiritual life in a linear progression. Religious educators have coined a term for this progression, “faith development.” From parent to pastor to teacher to friends to spouse to children, it is all supposed to work in predictable steps to a predictable result. This has worked and does work for many–until, that is, there isn’t a parent or a loving pastor or friend to share the gospel, or the mind and the heart of the seeker won’t follow the formula, or the Lord has other plans. Then the champions of the process have to face the questions that my mom faced–is the cherished progression a means or the end; a pathway or an idol? Is the desired result a faithful reproduction of the template or a life-changing encounter with the living Christ? What choice

It is a wrong and shameful thing to dismiss someone’s acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior because it resulted from a direct encounter with him instead of at the end of a ten-lesson Bible study. The Apostle Paul pointed out that there is a danger of “group-think” Christianity that attempts to compel behavior “to make a good showing in the flesh” as a substitute for a personal and uncontrollable experience of the cross of Christ (Gal 6:12).

The real issue, of course, is whether the source, goal and power of the process of conversion is Christ (Jn 15; 1 Cor 1:30; Col 2:6,19). If it is, then, the differences between a star and the “four spiritual laws,” a cathedral or a stable, the dry interpretations of the religious leaders and scholars or overwhelming joy, a dream or an in-depth study of prophesy, are as nothing. As the Apostle Paul said of his own circuitous route to faith in Jesus Christ, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).

My wife Patricia, reflecting on the story, tells me that the wise men going a different direction after they met Jesus is what really proves that they were wise men. The meaning of repentance is to change directions. Jesus described the Holy Spirit to Nicodemus as “a wind that blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (Jn 3:8). We can expect an encounter with the living God to be nothing less than life-changing in powerful and surprising ways.

So you and I leave another celebration of Christ’s birth and enter a new year. Have we changed our direction?

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.

Kent and his beloved Patricia are enjoying their 31st year of marriage. They are the proud parents of Andrew, a college student.