Over the years, I've heard a lot of "divine" rationalizations from folks who really just want to do what they want to do, but like to tell themselves that God is behind them 110%. 

The line I hear most frequently goes something like this: "God has given me all this talent, and He just wants me to live up to my potential." Then, to help me understand the great godly principle at work here, he or she will add something along the lines of, "Why else would He have given me this talent for _______?" (Fill in the blank with whatever you think you're especially good at.)

Really? Is that what God wants of us? To take the business world by storm, or create the most arresting paintings or provide the most effective caregiving or grow the prettiest garden in the neighborhood?

How do we reconcile this thinking with what we read in Luke 9? 

"If anyone desires to come after Me," Jesus is quoted as saying in verses 23-26, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father's, and of the holy angels."

Call me crazy, but this doesn't sound like a command to live out our earthly dreams. It doesn't sound like an invitation to be the best we can be in whatever disciplines we seem to excel in. It doesn't even sound like we're supposed to go for the gusto, or chase after our personal happiness.

Instead, the Lord has commanded a different sort of life for His children -- those who have repented and trusted in Christ. We are to ignore our own desires, to bear whatever burden He has allowed in our lives, and to obey Him. 

That's a tall order, one that we'll never fulfill perfectly in this life. I don't suppose most of us will ever even come close for more than a few minutes at a crack. 

But if we take His words to heart, at least we can stop fooling ourselves into believing that we're pursuing our personal ambitions for His sake. And then we can set out on the journey that He does want us to take -- to "be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding," as the apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 1:9-10, "that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God." 

This is the potential He wants us to pursue. And He has laid out the who, what, where, when, how and why of it, in exquisite detail and in language anyone can understand, in the Bible.   

It’s been almost half a century since I read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any of the movies made from it. And I’ve never been very good at memorization.

Yet to this day I can recite the last line of this beloved novel:

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”  

The speaker, of course, is Sydney Carton. He is headed for the guillotine, sacrificing himself to accept the punishment meant for the aristocrat Charles Darnay.

I don’t know about you, but I see in this story a reflection, albeit imperfect, of Christ’s death on the cross as payment for the sins of the world, so that “whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:15).  

But apparently I’m wrong about that, because the Wikipedia entry on this novel insists on another meaning entirely: “The very last thoughts attributed to Carton, in their poetic use of repetition, register this faith as a calm and soothing certainty: that both the name of Sydney Carton and of France will be reborn into glory and made ‘illustrious.’"

There’s no mention of Jesus Christ in this somewhat lengthy synopsis. No mention of the biblical account of His sacrifice, which seemed to me so clearly to have inspired Dickens. And just one mention of Heaven, in its quotation of the novel’s opening paragraph.  

So color my face red: A Tale of Two Cities must be nothing more than a compelling saga about those greedy aristocrats and the noble (if murderous) revolutionaries and a suicidal lawyer who was trying to make a name for himself with his Top Secret sacrifice.

Just one problem with that assessment: Charles Dickens was a devoted Christian and student of the New Testament. Consider just some of what he wrote on the subject:

• “The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.” 
• “Remember!--It is Christianity to do good always--even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbours as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to show that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything." 
• “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour.” 
• “I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man’s narrow construction of its letter here or there.”

What's more, Dickens’ last published work was a gospel-retelling entitled The Life of our Lord. Written for his children, it was an instant best-seller when it was finally published in 1934, after the death of his last child.  

Some observers charge that Dickens believed in a works-based plan of salvation. If that’s true – and it may be so – how curious that he painted, in Sydney Carton, such an astounding picture of substitutionary sacrifice in the satisfaction of a death penalty. I certainly have read only an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s books, so I’m no expert; but from what I have read, I don’t know of any novelist who more clearly captured Christ’s atoning sacrifice.    

I’m guessing there must be much more biblical imagery in A Tale of Two Cities – imagery that I would have missed when I first read it, having been well on my way to full-blown atheism, and having never paid a bit of attention to my weekly Sunday School lessons. It’s high time I dug out my old copy of this wonderful old novel and read it through the lens of the Bible.   

It’s clearly our duty to help the lost-but-looking find their way to Christ. As the apostle Peter wrote, “Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15b).  Sincere seekers will gladly listen to the evidence you present. Here’s how.

1. Pray for opportunities and wisdom. God is the only one who can soften a seeker’s heart, and the only one who knows exactly what he or she needs to hear.
2. Help frame the questions. We don’t know what we don’t know, and the lost may not even know what questions to ask. Answering these questions can be a good place to begin: Can I be sure that there a God? If so, which one is the real deal?
3. Point to the Creator. Ask the $64,000 question: How can we logically credit a painter for a painting, or a sculptor for a sculpture, and yet deny that a Creator was responsible for the creation? 
4. Clarify the candidates. Which One is the real God? To give your seeker a grasp of the alternatives, offer a copy of James Sire’s The Universe Next Door – or familiarize yourself with its content and present it in a nutshell. Then challenge him or her to find evidence for Christianity’s competitors. (Good luck with that!)
5. Amass evidence that the Bible is absolute truth. Determine whether your seeker is most interested in prophecy, history, science, or logic, and then present the pertinent evidence to demonstrate scripture's truth and divine inspiration. 
6. Explain the gospel – that we’re all sinners headed for hell, but that Jesus paid our personal penalties for sin so that we can spend eternity with Him in heaven – all in exchange for repenting and trusting in Him rather than our own non-existent “goodness.”
7. Pray some more. Ask the Lord to do whatever it takes to usher your seeker safely into His fold – and to help you walk worthy before him or her.
8. Count the cost. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake” (Luke 6:22). It’s going to happen, if you’re witnessing effectively. Recognize it as a small price to pay for your salvation.
9. Encourage yourself. In the end, heaven is the only treasure worth pursuing in this life – for yourself, and for everyone you know. Always keep your eye on the prize: eternal life with the One who died for you.
10. Be patient. You may not see much progress in your seeker’s heart today, or next week, or even after years. It may not even happen in your lifetime. Rest secure in the knowledge that you’ve been faithful to plant the seeds of faith, and let the Holy Spirit do the rest. 

When I started seeking God back in 2000, I almost immediately landed squarely in the middle of the origins debate, wondering exactly who or what was responsible for our existence. 

Perhaps my greatest surprise over the next year was the realization that all scientists – secularists and creationists alike – are working from the same evidence. Since not one of them was there when it happened, the best anyone can do is find the explanation that fits all the evidence and leaves no loose ends.

In many ways, it’s like a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery replete with conflicting and incomplete evidence. For the local officials, no matter how they assemble that evidence, there’s always something that doesn’t quite fit. Until along comes Hercules Poirot, or Miss Jane Marple, to take a fresh look at all the clues. Before long, voila! Hercules or Jane are unveiling the only possible solution, the only scenario that accommodates all the facts.

The mystery surrounding the origins of the universe is like the finest Christie whodunit. There were no human witnesses to the critical event, and there’s only one solution that accounts for all the evidence without mandating a Rube Goldberg-esque series of just-so stories.

Consider just a few of the holes that every “all natural” origins theory must plug in order to make what appears, to the public, to be a coherent case for itself. Where did space come from? And all the compressed matter? What caused the Big Bang? How did life spring into being?  Ah, yes, secular origins scientists have proposed solutions to all such questions – but they are nothing more than ideas, with no facts to back them up. These ideas simply must be so, because otherwise their whole God-free house of cards collapses.

What’s more, these origins scientists make liberal use of red herrings, lies, cover-ups and misrepresentations of the clues. I’d like to say that Agatha herself would be proud of such subterfuge, but in truth I think she’d be embarrassed by its clumsiness.

Fortunately, there are plenty of true Poirots and Marples in the scientific community. They looked at all the evidence and discarded the theories that don’t fit, including the hole-ridden theory of Darwinian evolution. They then turned to the Bible and pointed to the only solution that fits all the facts: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Of course, all the non-Poirot and non-Marple origins scientists routinely scream bloody murder over this denouement, insisting that God could not have created everything because He doesn’t exist. And besides, they sputter, science excludes the supernatural.

But that’s okay. Poirot and Miss Marple had their detractors, too. In the end, they knew exactly whodunit, didn’t they?

And when it comes to the most important whodunit of all, it’s no mystery to those who’ve taken their blinders off. Have you figured it out yet?