Pastors are sometimes approached by people who seem to have experienced some kind of religious impulse, but have no clear idea what it is pointing them to. Such folks show up at churches or seek out pastors for help in figuring out where to find what are looking for. One pastor gives this account of a “star–driven stable seeker” who came to him:
One day a man who seemed quite ill at ease and unsettled contacted me. He was a stranger to me, but had apparently chosen me because I am a pastor. He told me that he was looking for something, but he wasn’t sure just what. He described himself as spiritual, spoke of being taken to church as a child and even said that he believed in Jesus. So I asked him what he believed about Jesus, and his fuzzy answer led me to conclude that his knowledge of Jesus stopped at a beginner level. After some further discussion, I realized that he was also dealing with some very earthbound problems, some of which I was not equipped to counsel him about, and I told him so. But when he returned to spiritual topics and voiced some assumptions about Jesus that I knew weren’t supported by scripture, I suggested that he go home and read the Gospel of Mark, and then get together with me again to talk about what he’d read.
He agreed, and said he had a Bible. But later that evening, he phoned me and said he had his Bible open, but couldn’t find Mark. I directed him to the table of contents, but he told me that page was missing, so then I told him Mark was the second book in the New Testament, but that didn’t help because he didn’t know what the New Testament was. So finally, I had him open the Bible, tell me what he saw, and then I directed him to turn pages until he got to Mark. (Thanks to Stan Purdum for this story from his ministry.)
The pastor says that, unfortunately, this man never got back in touch to talk and soon moved away. It’s likely that some of his other problems were interfering with his spiritual search. Nonetheless, spiritually speaking, this pastor gave him the right advice. The real Jesus of scripture is the one who is the end of that search.