FIVE

The Day Jesus Got Mad

LIKE MOST CHRISTIANS, I love the mental picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd putting the lamb on his shoulders and carrying it to safety.

I love the soft image of the Baby in the manger.

I love the story about Christ feeding the hungry multitudes with bread and fish.

When I think about Jesus dying on the cross to pay for my sin, I’m deeply moved.

I marvel at the sight of him bursting out of the tomb, alive on Resurrection morning.

But there is one picture of Jesus that, frankly, doesn’t seem to fit. It is so stunning I wonder why God would even put it in the Bible … not once, but twice. The second account is in Mark 11:15–18.

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written:

“‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’?

But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

The twelve disciples were no doubt just as stunned as the crowd; nothing is said about their helping their Master clean house. All by himself Jesus started pitching over the tables, blocking people who were carrying things, and saying, “Get out of here with that! You can’t bring that through the courts.” He stormed over to the merchants of oxen and sheep and doves, saying, “Out! Get your business out of here!”

What happened to the loving Jesus? Anyone who gets that irate and physical surely must not be walking in the Spirit, right? But this was Jesus Christ. In fact, the first time he did this a couple of years before (see John 2), he even made a whip out of cords. He was physically thrashing people out of the temple!

What made God’s Son so agitated?

His house was being prostituted for purposes other than what was intended.

As the feathers were flying and the coins were clattering to the pavement and the businessmen were shouting for the police, Jesus said above the roar, “This place looks and feels more like a mall than a temple. Whatever happened to Isaiah’s word about the real point of this building—to be a house of prayer for all nationalities and races? Out! Get out, all of you!”

JUST DOING THEIR JOB

THE ODD THING ABOUT this event is that if Eyewitness News had interviewed any of the merchants that day, each would have vigorously defended the right to be there. “We provide an essential service to the worshipers,” they would have said. “How else are people going to get the required animal to sacrifice? If you live any distance away, you can’t be herding your sheep and cows through the streets of Jerusalem. We’ve got to help the program along….” But, of course, they had added a gouging surcharge to the price.

The money changers would have said the same. “Everybody has to pay the temple tax, and people can’t be walking in here with Greek or Roman or Macedonian money. They’ve got to use the special coins minted here in Jerusalem. We help people with their currency problems.” But once again, they were tacking on big-time profits.

For all of us involved in preaching the gospel, performing music, publishing Christian materials, and all the rest, there is an uncomfortable message here: Jesus is not terribly impressed with religious commercialism. He is concerned not only whether we’re doing God’s work, but also how and why we’re doing it. At the Judgment Seat of Christ, his main questions for me will have to do not with the growth or the budget of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, but with why I pastored this church—in what spirit.

If you sing in a choir, the question is not just if you’re on your note; it’s why you are singing at all.

If you teach a class, are you doing it with a heart that radiates God’s love for the students, or for some other reason?

I am dismayed at the contracts required by some contemporary Christian musical groups. To perform a concert at your church, the stated fee will be so much (in either four or five figures) plus round-trip airfare—often in first class, not coach. Every detail of the accommodations is spelled out, down to “sushi for twenty persons” waiting at the hotel, in one case. All this is done so that the group can stand before an inner-city audience and exhort the people to “just trust the Lord for all your needs.”

Our forebears back in the camp meeting days used to say that if people left a meeting talking about what a wonderful sermon the preacher gave or how beautifully the singers sang, the meeting had failed. But if people went home saying things like “Isn’t God good? He met me tonight in such a wonderful way,” it was a good meeting. There was to be no sharing the stage with the Lord.

The first-century money changers were in the temple, but they didn’t have the spirit of the temple. They may have played a legitimate role in assisting people to worship, but they were out of sync with the whole purpose of the Lord’s house.

“The atmosphere of my Father’s house,” Jesus seemed to say, “is to be prayer. The aroma around my Father must be that of people opening their hearts in worship and supplication. This is not just a place to make a buck. This is a house for calling on the Lord.”

I do not mean to imply that the Jerusalem temple, built by Herod the Great, is the direct counterpart of our church buildings today. God no longer centers his presence in one particular building. In fact, the New Testament teaches that we are now his dwelling place; he lives in his people. How much more important, then, is Jesus’ message about the primacy of prayer?

The feature that is supposed to distinguish Christian churches, Christian people, and Christian gatherings is the aroma of prayer. It doesn’t matter what your tradition or my tradition is. The house is not ours anyway; it is the Father’s.

Does the Bible ever say anywhere from Genesis to Revelation, “My house shall be called a house of preaching”?

Does it ever say, “My house shall be called a house of music”?

Of course not.

The Bible does say, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” Preaching, music, the reading of the Word—these things are fine; I believe in and practice all of them. But they must never override prayer as the defining mark of God’s dwelling. The honest truth is that I have seen God do more in people’s lives during ten minutes of real prayer than in ten of my sermons.

THE CHURCH’S MAIN POINT

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that Jesus launched the Christian church, not while someone was preaching, but while people were praying? In the first two chapters of Acts, the disciples were doing nothing but waiting on God. As they were just sitting there … worshiping, communing with God, letting God shape them and cleanse their spirits and do those heart operations that only the Holy Spirit can do … the church was born. The Holy Spirit was poured out.

What does it say about our churches today that God birthed the church in a prayer meeting, and prayer meetings today are almost extinct?

Am I the only one who gets embarrassed when religious leaders in America talk about having prayer in public schools? We don’t have even that much prayer in many churches! Out of humility, you would think we would keep quiet on that particular subject until we practice what we preach in our own congregations.

I am sure that the Roman emperors didn’t have prayer to God in their schools. But then, the early Christians didn’t seem to care what Caligula or Claudius or Nero did. How could any emperor stop God? How, in fact, could the demons of hell make headway when God’s people prayed and called upon his name? Impossible!

In the New Testament we don’t see Peter or John wringing their hands and saying, “Oh, what are we going to do? Caligula’s bisexual … he wants to appoint his horse to the Roman Senate … what a terrible model of leadership! How are we going to respond to this outrage?”

Let’s not play games with ourselves. Let’s not divert attention away from the weak prayer life of our own churches. In Acts 4, when the apostles were unjustly arrested, imprisoned, and threatened, they didn’t call for a protest; they didn’t reach for some political leverage. Instead, they headed to a prayer meeting. Soon the place was vibrating with the power of the Holy Spirit (vv. 23–31).

The apostles had this instinct: When in trouble, pray. When intimidated, pray. When challenged, pray. When persecuted, pray.

The British Bible translator J. B. Phillips, after completing his work on this section of Scripture, could not help reflecting on what he had observed. In the 1955 preface to his first edition of Acts, he wrote:

It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book … without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ….

Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by overorganization. These men did not make ‘acts of faith,’ they believed; they did not ‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.¹

Open on the God-ward side … doesn’t that stir your spirit? That one brief phrase sums up the secret of power in the early church, a secret that hasn’t changed one bit in twenty centuries.

NO ONE TOO TOUGH

A FASCINATING FOOTNOTE APPEARS in Acts 9 when Saul of Tarsus, the violent persecutor of the church, was converted, and God needed a believer to minister to him. Naturally, no Christian wanted to get within five blocks of the man. Yet God coaxed Ananias along by saying, “Go … ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying” (v.11). This was the proof, it seems, that everything had changed. “It’s okay, Ananias … calm down … you don’t have to be afraid now, it’s safe: He’s praying.”

At the Brooklyn Tabernacle a few years ago, we saw the Lord break through to an equally tough sinner in answer to believing prayer. The whole outreach that touched Ricardo Aparicio was born in prayer.

Most ministries in our church have not begun with a bright idea in a pastors’ meeting. We usually don’t say, “Let’s start a street outreach,” and then go recruit laypeople to staff it. We have learned over the years to let God birth something in people who are spiritually sensitive, who begin to pray and feel a calling. Then they come to us. “We want to start such-and-such,” they say—and the ministry gets going and lasts. Discouragement, complications, and other attacks by the enemy don’t wash it out.

A fellow named Terry and some others grew concerned for the subculture of male prostitutes that flourishes on the Lower West Side of Manhattan in a place called the “salt mines,” where the city keeps salt for deicing streets in the winter. This sick subculture ranges up to a couple of hundred men when the weather is warm. Living in abandoned vehicles or subterranean cavities, many dress in drag and offer themselves to customers who come by—some of them wealthy professionals in stretch limousines.

Many of them, as boys, were raped by adult male relatives. At the “salt mines” they start as young as age sixteen but they don’t last much beyond forty; after that, they are either in jail or dead from a sexually transmitted disease or a drug overdose. The neighborhood has many leather-and-chain bars. Some of the male prostitutes carry razor blades for protection.

Our outreach team began to bring food and blankets during the daylight hours on Saturday, when the men weren’t distracted by their “work.” Although the men made considerable money, they tended to squander it on drugs. That left them scavenging garbage cans and dumpsters for food.

To feel compassion for these guys, to understand their wretched life, was extremely difficult. We prayed fervently on Tuesday nights for love, compassion—and protection.

My teenage daughter Susan became part of the team, and more than once she told me, “Daddy, it was so frustrating last night! I was talking to this drag queen about Jesus, and he was really listening to me. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere with him—up rolls this limo, the rear door opens a crack, a hand beckons—and he’s gone. ‘Sorry, Susan—gotta take care of business now,’ he says to me.”

All was not in vain, however. One Sunday afternoon about half an hour before the afternoon service, Terry knocked on my office door. “Pastor Cymbala! We’ve got twenty-seven guys here today from the ‘salt mines.’ Isn’t that great!”

“How did that happen?” I asked.

“We got a bunch of vans and brought them. For many of them, this is going to be their first time ever in church.”

I learned later that one of them had a machete inside the sleeve of his raincoat just “in case” he felt he needed to use it.

The congregation took their presence in stride, even though the men didn’t exactly look—or smell—All-American. At the end of the service some of them responded to give their hearts to the Lord. Others sat stunned as church members greeted them with smiles and handshakes.

Walking down the center aisle, I bumped into an attractive woman in a black dress, with blond, shoulder-length hair, nicely done nails, black stockings, and high heels. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said.

She turned … and this low voice with a heavy Spanish accent replied, “No, that’s okay, man.”

My heart skipped a beat. This was not a woman after all. But neither was it a sloppy transvestite. This was a knockout of a “woman”—bone-thin, no body hair thanks to hormonal treatment. As I took closer notice, the only visual giveaway was the Adam’s apple.

I edged toward my wife. “Carol, you’re not going to believe this,” I whispered, “but that’s a guy standing over there.”

“Don’t fool me,” she said.

“I’m not kidding. That is a guy—trust me.”

His name was Ricardo, known on the street as “Sarah.” Terry reported later, “He was the main troublemaker of all. He introduced all the young kids to crack cocaine and prostitution.” Ricardo had been plying his trade for at least ten years, and the dreariness was finally starting to get to him. Imagine the despair of hustling most of the night to make $400 or $600, immediately blowing that money on cocaine, falling asleep under a bridge … and waking up the next morning to pick through garbage cans looking for some breakfast. The next night, as evening draws near, you start all over again.

Ricardo sat in the meetings, and it dawned on him that maybe he could be different. This Jesus could actually set him free from crack. Perhaps this Jesus could even change him into a true man, not this half-and-half person he assumed was his nature. He had been teased from childhood about being effeminate. His mother had pleaded with him to forsake homosexuality, and he had tried, to no avail. His willpower had failed him countless times.

But the idea that God was stronger, that God could in fact change him on the inside … that was a new thought. Ricardo kept listening, and after about a month, he gave his heart to the Lord. It was not a dramatic conversion; I am not even sure when it happened. But it was real on the inside.

I will never forget the Tuesday night we introduced him to the congregation. He stood before us, a bit shy, in male clothing. His blond hair had been cut, and dark roots were now growing out. His nail polish had been chipped off. Subconscious habits were being overhauled with instruction from Terry and the others: “No, Ricardo, don’t cross your legs like that. Put your ankle all the way up on your other knee….” It sounds humorous, but they had to start all the way back at “square one” with how a man sits and walks.

The congregation couldn’t help but cheer and praise God for this miracle. Ricardo stood there perplexed at the noise. Why were all these people applauding him?

In the months that followed, Ricardo made great progress in his spiritual life. It took three months to get him straight enough even to be accepted in a drug rehabilitation program. Nevertheless, his commitment to follow Christ was solid. The old had gone, the new had definitely come.

Ricardo had come out of pitch blackness and into the light. Charles Spurgeon once said that when a jeweler shows his best diamonds, he sets them against a black velvet backdrop. The contrast of the jewels against the dark velvet brings out the luster. In the same way, God does his most stunning work where things seem hopeless. Wherever there is pain, suffering, and desperation, Jesus is. And that’s where his people belong—among those who are vulnerable, who think nobody cares. What better place for the brilliance of Christ to shine?

Ricardo eventually moved to Texas. I was in Dallas one summer and ran into him. It was great to see the transformation. He had gained weight and was every inch a real man. I hugged him, and then he delivered a new shock:

“Pastor, I wish you could come back in two weeks. I’m getting married!”

“You’re what?” My mind flashed back to the first time I had met him dressed in drag.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve met a Christian woman named Betty, and we love each other deeply. We’re getting married.”

The fact that Ricardo had AIDS made the situation complicated. But with proper guidance and counseling, he and Betty established a new home together.

A LEGACY TO LEAVE

A FEW YEARS LATER, at Christmastime, while I was in my office just as the Sunday afternoon service was beginning, I received a message that said Ricardo was dying. He wanted to talk to me.

I slumped in my chair, and as I picked up the phone, Betty’s voice greeted me. “Hello, Pastor…. When I put my husband on the phone, you won’t be able to hear much, because he’s very weak. But he still remembers all that you and the church did for him.”

In a moment I heard a fragile, wispy voice say, “Pastor—Cymbala—so—glad—to—hear—you.”

I choked up.

Ricardo continued, forcing out the breathy syllables: “I—never—forgot—how—you—all—loved—me—and—took—me—in.—Thank—you—so—much.”

My ministerial instincts then revived, and I prepared to make a comforting little speech, to tell him he would be going to heaven soon, that he would get there before me but I would see him on the other side for all eternity….

The Holy Spirit stopped me. No! a voice seemed to say. Fight for him! Cry out to me!

I changed course. “Ricardo, I’m going to pray for you right now. Don’t try to pray along with me; save your strength.” I began to intercede with intensity, fighting against the death that loomed before him. “O God, touch Ricardo with your power! This is not his time to die. Restore him, for your glory, I pray.” I remember even hitting my desk a couple of times with my fist.

When I finished, I marched directly into the meeting and stopped it. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Ricardo, whom most of you know,” I said. People looked up expectantly all across the building. “He’s very sick with AIDS—but I want us to pray for his recovery.”

That unleashed a torrent of prayer as people cried out to God for Ricardo.

I called Betty two days later. “Pastor Cymbala, it’s incredible!” she reported. “He went to sleep after the two of you talked—and the next day, all his vital signs had done a U-turn. He began to eat, after taking almost nothing for days.”

Within three weeks, Ricardo actually flew to New York and came walking unannounced into a Tuesday night prayer meeting. The crowd gasped with joy.

In my heart I felt that God spared him for a reason: To get his testimony onto video so that others could know his remarkable story. This eventually became a gripping eight-minute segment of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir’s concert video called Live at Madison Square Garden (Warner Alliance). The power of his testimony, shot on the streets in the “salt mines,” is riveting. It may partly explain why the video surprised us all by staying on Billboard’s national best-seller list for months.

The last time I saw Ricardo, a year later, his weight had dropped again. “I’m so tired,” he said. “I’ve fought this disease long enough; I just want to go to Jesus. I can go now, because you have me on film, and everybody will know in years to come what Jesus did in my life.” He passed away not long afterward.

THE SECRET OF GRACE

RICARDO’S STORY IS EVIDENCE of what God will do in response to fervent prayer. No one is beyond his grace. No situation, anywhere on earth, is too hard for God.

The apostle Paul, having benefited from that grace in his own life, preached and wrote about it ever after. He outlines in Romans 10:13–15 a chain of events that describes New Testament salvation:

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?

Churches often refer to this passage in connection with overseas missionary work. “We need to give a good offering today in order to send out preachers,” they say—which is true. But that is just the beginning of Paul’s sequence.

Sending leads to preaching.

Preaching leads to hearing.

Hearing leads to believing.

Believing leads to calling on the name of the Lord.

Notice that believing is not the climax. Even the great Protestant Reformers who taught us the principle of sola fide(“faith alone”) also preached that intellectual assent alone does not bring salvation. There is one more step for demonstrating a real and living faith, and that is calling out to God with all of one’s heart and soul.

The clearest instructions about church life come in the Pastoral Letters, where Paul tells young pastors such as Timothy how to proceed. The apostle couldn’t be more direct than in 1 Timothy 2:1:

“I urge then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone.”

Why? Why first of all, before anything else? Well, Timothy my son, we’ve got to remember that God’s house is to be called a house of prayer.

Later in the same chapter (v.8), Paul says, “I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing.” That is the sign of a Christian church.

The book of Revelation says that when the twenty-four elders eventually fall at the feet of Jesus, each one will have a golden bowl—and do you know what’s in the bowls? What is this incense that is so fragrant to Christ? “The prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:8).

Just imagine … you and I kneel or stand or sit down to pray, really opening our hearts to God—and what we say is so precious to him that he keeps it like a treasure.

In the community where you live, what church do you know that takes a prominent night of the week, with all the leaders present, and says that because prayer is so great, so central to Jesus’ definition of the church, they’re going to concentrate on prayer?

Americans designate one day a year as a National Day of Prayer. Do we have any right to ask mayors and senators to show up for a special event, with the television cameras rolling, if we don’t have regular prayer meetings in our churches? If praying is that important, why don’t we do it every week?

How is it that Christians today will pay $20 to hear the latest Christian artist in concert, but Jesus can’t draw a crowd?

For myself, I have decided that the Tuesday night prayer meeting is so crucial that I will never be out of town two Tuesdays in a row. If that means I can’t accept certain speaking invitations across the land, so be it. Why would I prefer to be anywhere else?

The Bible has all these promises:

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7).

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13).

“You do not have, because you do not ask God” (James 4:2).

Isn’t it time to say, “Stop! We’re going to pray, because God said that when we pray, he will intervene.”

The sad truth is, in the city where I live—as in Chicago and Philadelphia and Houston and right across to L.A.—more people are turning to crack than to Christ. More people are dipping into drugs than are getting baptized in water. What is going to reverse this tide? Preaching alone will not do it; classes aren’t going to do it; more money for more programs won’t do it. Only turning God’s house into a house of fervent prayer will reverse the power of evil so evident in the world today.

THE MISSING LINK

OVER THE LAST 30 years, more books have been written about marriage than in all the preceding 2,000 years of church history. But ask any pastor in America if there aren’t proportionally more troubled marriages today than in any other era. We have all the how-to’s, but homes are still falling apart.

The couple that prays together stays together. I don’t mean to be simplistic; there will be difficult moments in any union. But God’s Word is true when it says, “Call upon me, and I will help you. Just give me a chance.”

The same holds true for parenting. We may own stacks of good books on child rearing and spending “quality time” with our children. Yet we have more problems per 100 young people in the church today than at any previous time. This is not because we lack knowledge or how-to; it is because we have not cried out for the power and grace of God.

What if, in the last 25 years, we had invested only half the time and energy in writing, publishing, reading, and discussing books on the Christian family … and put the other half into praying for our marriages and our children? I am certain we would be in far better shape today.

Again, J. B. Phillips points out with great insight:

The Holy Spirit has a way of short-circuiting human problems. Indeed, in exactly the same way as Jesus Christ in the flesh cut right through the matted layers of tradition and exposed the real issue; … so we find here [in Acts] the Spirit of Jesus dealing not so much with problems as with people. Many problems comparable to modern complexities never arise here because the men and women concerned were of one heart and mind in the Spirit…. Since God’s Holy Spirit cannot conceivably have changed one iota through the centuries,… He is perfectly prepared to short-circuit, by an inflow of love, wisdom and understanding, many human problems today.²

That is why the writer to the Hebrews nails down the most central activity of all for Christians: “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb. 4:16). It doesn’t say, “Let us come to the sermon.” We in America have made the sermon the centerpiece of the church, something God never intended. Preachers who are really doing their job get people to come to the throne of grace. That’s the true source of grace and mercy.

To every preacher and every singer, God will someday ask, “Did you bring people to where the action could be found … at the throne of grace? If you just entertained them, if you just tickled their ears and gave them a warm, fuzzy moment, woe unto you. At the throne of grace, I could have changed their lives. Jim Cymbala, did you just dazzle people with your cleverness, or did you make them hungry to come to me?”

If a meeting doesn’t end with people touching God, what kind of a meeting is it? We haven’t really encountered God. We haven’t met with the only One powerful and loving enough to change our lives.

I am well aware that we don’t get everything we ask for; we have to ask according to God’s will. But let us not use theological dodges to avoid the fact that we often go without things God wants us to have right now, today, because we fail to ask. Too seldom do we get honest enough to admit, “Lord, I can’t handle this alone. I’ve just hit the wall for the thirty-second time and I need you.”

The words of the old hymn ring true:

Oh, what peace we often forfeit,

Oh, what needless pain we bear,

All because we do not carry

Everything to God in prayer.

God has chosen prayer as his channel of blessing. He has spread a table for us with every kind of wisdom, grace, and strength because he knows exactly what we need. But the only way we can get it is to pull up to the table and taste and see that the Lord is good.

Pulling up to that table is called the prayer of faith.

In other words, God doesn’t tell us to pray because he wants to impose some sort of regimen on us. This is not a system of legalism. E. M. Bounds wrote,

Prayer ought to enter into the spiritual habits, but it ceases to be prayer when it is carried on by habit only…. Desire gives fervor to prayer. The soul cannot be listless when some great desire fixes and inflames it…. Strong desires make strong prayers….

The neglect of prayer is the fearful token of dead spiritual desires. The soul has turned away from God when desire after him no longer presses it into the closet. There can be no true praying without desire.³

God says to us, “Pray, because I have all kinds of things for you; and when you ask, you will receive. I have all this grace, and you live with scarcity. Come unto me, all you who labor. Why are you so rushed? Where are you running now? Everything you need, I have.”

If the times are indeed as bad as we say they are … if the darkness in our world is growing heavier by the moment … if we are facing spiritual battles right in our own homes and churches … then we are foolish not to turn to the One who supplies unlimited grace and power. He is our only source. We are crazy to ignore him.