"Peanuts.........................."

My Bibles are filled with various addenda, notes scribbled in the side margins, whole paragraphs of my own thinking inserted wherever the publisher was kind enough to leave me enough blank space to opine, quotations and cartoons on either end, I collect it all. In the one I picked up this morning, Charlie Brown and Linus met me with a bit of humor that exactly matched my frame of mind. Four panels, the first beginning with the two resting their elbows on some sort of wall and the latter expressing his desire to be a prophet when he “gets big”; then the other answering how he believed that to be “a fine ambition, especially since the world could always use a few good prophets”. Not stopping there, however, the guy who always seems to get the short end of the stick went on to note how so many of them turn out to be wrong in what they prophesy; and, ever the optimistic fellow, Linus replies that maybe he can be “a sincere false prophet”!... Smiling in my perusal, I pondered if, while the Church may indeed contain its share of hypocrites, perhaps the rest of us who claim membership therein might not well fall into this category. Not that the message of Christ has no validity; rather that we, in our dissemination of it, even though we have good intentions, struggle with our humanity. N.T. Wright speaks of our needing, as believers, to learn that, just because we possess the Book, it doesn’t mean we possess truth in its entirety. We are meant to be vessels for Truth; or, as C.S. Lewis put it: “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it!” In other words, if Christ be in us, then He is well able to bear witness of Himself if we but get out of the way……