The letter flowed in the quaint idiom of an African village teenager for whom English is a precarious second language. But it jolted me, as if my dentist had jabbed a raw nerve.
The letter started and ended simply enough:
"Dear Christ's followers: I am a new young Christian. I have [am] faced with problems and I need help... Can I know much from you?
“[Signed] Magara''
But those questions in between were difficult for me to answer, living as I do far from his real world in his remote African village. But I must send him some answer since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of "all men" and expects His ministers to have something helpful to say even to a teenager in an African village. Magara first asks this question:
"(1) The Bible says that if you meet one who is in a bad way, help him. Suppose while I was going on the way, I found someone carrying a pot of pombe [native beer]; shall I help him?"
I happen to know a little about African village life. The "one in a bad way" carrying a pot of pombe is very likely his aged aunt or grandmother. To her, selling her beer is the only way she knows to get some cash for buying soap or salt. Suppose Magara, the "new young Christian," refuses to have anything to do with her enterprise. "No, dear grandother; I can no longer help with the 'manufacture or sale of alcoholic ... ' " She retorts, "What a fine Christian you are—not helping your poor old grandmother!"
The next question is as difficult:
"(2) Suppose I am on the way from the church on the Sabbath, and I find someone carrying a very heavy sack of maize to market; can I help by carrying it?"
This is also very likely a relative, maybe the same grandmother or aged aunt. "No, dear aunt, I am a Christian now and I cannot help you carry your heavy burden today. Only tomorrow." You think Magara's questions are easy to answer? Put yourself in the African village, and you'll see they are not!
But the last question almost stumped me, for it crystallizes in microcosm the great struggle between Christ and Satan and perplexes every alert follower of Christ wherever he lives.
"(3) What can one do not to do wrong again when he has believed in Christ?" What does Magara mean by this question?
Magara's village is what the apostle John called "the world" which we are not to love any more. His village may be even more "the world" than the place where you live, even though your "world" may be filled with sex shops and pornographic magazines on your street corner and lurid massage parlor signs beckoning you on your way to town.
Magara doesn't need Playboy or Hustler in his village, nor does he need to pay money to see temptations in books, magazines, or on a screen. Such vicarious pleasures would be ludicrous there. Many village girls—even professed Christians—are only too ready to put on a show for Magara—the real thing, free, anytime. And he knows very well how enticing are their wiles. Most of his Christian friends have no scruples about not "doing wrong again" after one has "believed in Christ."
The overwhelming impact of nearly a century of Christianity in Africa has drilled into the people the idea that you keep right on sinning after you become a Christian. The only difference now is that you are saved in your sins instead of being lost in them, provided you keep your accounts with God up to date by proper confessions in church or to the priest, penances, and attendance at church, especially on Christmas and Easter.
You don't stop being human when you become a Christian, do you? The girls in Niagara's village have a coy way of asking him, "OK, you're a Christian now—but you're still you, aren't you, big boy?"
The pastor of one of Africa's largest churches recently lamented in public that over 90 percent of the brides who marched down his cathedral aisle last year were pregnant. And a bishop complained in the newspaper that most of the "big guys" involved in massive embezzlement and corruption are professed Christians. Of course, it is said, you're not expected to stop sinning when you become a Christian! It's impossible to stop. Doesn't everybody know that?
But Magara has a conscience that bothers him. He has discovered a pointed question that the Bible asks: "Should we continue to live in sin so that God's grace will increase? Certainly not! We have died to sin—how then can we go on living in it? For surely you know that when we were baptized into union with Christ Jesus, we were baptized into union with his death." Romans 6:1-3, TEV.
Magara has gotten this far in his Bible and he is concerned. He is still human—that he knows only too well. Maybe even painfully well. It didn't take long after his baptism for this to sink in. He still has his old sinful nature to contend with. He even discovers something else: evil desire seems enhanced now, and temptations are more alluring than they used to be. And he has heard of the African theologian who has come back from the overseas seminary who openly says that "occasional lapses" into sin are biblical and are "par for the course," that you simply cannot expect to overcome all temptations, and that the best you can hope for is to be a bit more discreet now.
"Occasional lapses"—that's rather elastic, Magara realizes. The interpretation can be according to your individual desires—once a week, maybe even once a day?
According to his letter, Magara dreads these defeats, for they leave him feeling polluted, guilt-ridden, and dissatisfied. Although pastors say that Christ saves you in your sins because He has done it all for you and that you can't do other than continue to transgress, Magara would like to know about some "good news" that will do better than that. If Christ can't save you from sinning today, how can you be sure He can resurrect you later on? What kind of future life would there be if "saved" people haven't stopped sinning?
The best "good news" he too often hears is the kind that Bishop Fulton Sheen marketed so enticingly: "One look at [Virgin Mary], and we know that ... because she is without sin, we can become less sinful."—The World's First Love, (London: Burns and Oates, 1953). p. 16. Emphasis supplied.
Therefore, if this were true, Magara must not raise his expectations too high. The best he can hope for is a tapering off, becoming "less sinful," but always expecting those "occasional lapses" that both Catholic and Protestant teachers say are so inevitable.
The girls, of course, aren't Magara's only problem. He probably liked the pombe his grandmother makes so well, for drinking alcoholic beverages has always been his way of life. And since childhood he has also probably been taught to lie, at least to tell white lies. Furthermore, who doesn't "blow his top" and swear when things don't go right? And the temptation to worship money is as real to him as to anybody else in the world.
That is why Magara is pleading, "I need help!"
Do I have some good news for Magara? Yes, I do! It's what the Bible calls "justification by faith." And if Magara can understand it, anybody can.