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Recently I viewed a documentary titled Frisbee, the life and death of a hippie preacher.  The film’s promotion material describes it this way:

“Imagine if John the Baptist came of age during the 1960s counter culture, the charisma of Jim Morrison flowing from the mantle of an Old Testament prophet. Meet Lonnie Frisbee, a seeker turned Jesus freak evangelist who compelled thousands towards a profession of Christian faith. During a trip into a canyon Frisbee claimed that God gave him a vision of his future as an influential evangelist to the hippie generation.  Four years later the vision would be fulfilled as pictures of Lonnie baptizing teenage converts were splashed across the pages of Time and Life magazines forever celebrating him as an icon of the Jesus movement.”

The documentary tells the story of Lonnie’s historic meeting with Pastor Chuck Smith and his dramatic influence in igniting the growth of Calvary Chapel, and later, the Vineyard churches.  Clearly, Lonnie had an anointing on his life, which influenced many of the pastors and teachers whose books you might be reading today, or whose radio shows you are listening to (including mine).

But Lonnie had problems.  In spite of the way the Lord used him, in spite of his love for Jesus and his commitment to preaching God’s Word, his own weaknesses overwhelmed him, and he lost his ministry, lost many of his friends, and died of AIDS.

Radical Times
When I showed this documentary to some of my family and friends, some admitted that they found it disturbing.  For one, it was such a radical time!  The Jesus Movement, which Lonnie was so instrumental in igniting, epitomized the Scripture,  “where sin abounded, grace abounded much more.”  Going to church was not always the clean, wholesome experience we know today in many of our suburban churches.  Kids who were on drugs, enmeshed in deep, disturbing sins, and the occult—who looked like walking sin with their dirty, bare feet and clothes, were stumbling into church, some of them not even sure why they were there.  Many were not coherent or sober. Some were tripping out on LSD, others were drunk or stoned.  Some truly did not even know how they got there.

But they met God and the Holy Spirit moved among them in a mighty way.  They were healed, and they were radically transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.  One believer today tells me that “I actually suddenly remembered who I was for the first time in who knows how long, and as I sat there in that Bible study, my mind cleared. I felt the presence of the Lord.” It was truly a revival, and a mighty work of God.  And He used godly men like Chuck Smith, and anointed men like Lonnie Frisbee.

When people tell me they are disturbed by the life of Lonnie, I try to put his story in a scriptural context by looking at the stories of other men of God, throughout the Bible. When you take a close, hard look at their lives, when they are no longer just Sunday School heroes, it’s almost shocking to realize how human they were!  Look at King David.

“I have found David son of Jesse a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do,” the Lord said of David (Acts 13:22).

Is David a Role Model?
Everything?  Did David really do everything the Lord wanted him to?  He must have, or the Lord wouldn’t have said it.  So I have to ask, looking at David’s record, what was it that God wanted Him to do that earned him the title “ a man after God’s own heart” and also gave him more space in the Bible than any other person other than Jesus?

Is David the role model to which we aspire?  Is his life something to emulate? The strength of David’s story, says Eugene Peterson, is that “David deals with God. As an instance of humanity in himself, he isn’t much.  He has little wisdom to pass on to us on how to live successfully.  He was an unfortunate parent and an unfaithful husband.  From a purely historical point of view he was a barbaric chieftain with a talent for poetry.  But David’s importance isn’t his morality or his military prowess but in his experience of and witness to God.  Every event in his life was a confrontation with God.”1

Wow.  For some of us with kind of a hero worship ideal of David in our minds, that statement is a little harsh and disillusioning.  But we can’t skirt the facts of David’s later life.  He did what he did, and that statement is accurate.  That’s what makes David so important.  It’s what helps us make sense of other flawed “heroes.”

John Calvin wrote of David, “Let us therefore remember that David is like a mirror, in which God sets before us the continual course of His grace.”

David did what God wanted him to do. He learned from his mistakes, repented of his sins—he paid dearly for some of his sins—and he always turned back to the Lord, always cried out to Him for mercy and strength.  He proclaimed, out of the depths of his heart, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart…” (Psalm 51).

David had it right.  He wasn’t much of a role model for life perhaps, but he was an example of loving God with passion, and of allowing God into his life, to love him and mold him into the man after God’s heart.

The key to Lonnie’s life, someone said, was that he did whatever and went wherever God told him.  He was available. He longed for his life to have meaning and purpose. Chuck Smith, speaking at Lonnie’s memorial service, compared him to Samson, a man of strength who gave into his weaknesses, but was still mightily used by God. Lonnie asked for forgiveness in the end, and died at peace with God.  The tragedy of his life, as Pastor Chuck said, was the lost potential.  He was another man, like Samson, endowed by God, filled with the Spirit of God, who lost his way for a time.

All these men influenced my life personally. I took Samson’s story as a warning and tried to learn from his mistakes.  And David—how many hours have I spent reading the Psalms and the stories of David, finding inspiration, courage, comfort, hope—the Lord. 

Pastor Chuck is my pastor.  I learned to teach the Bible and developed a pastor’s heart under his teaching.

And Lonnie—I knew him personally, and as a young Christian, living in the House of Psalms in Costa Mesa, I was caught up in the revival sweeping through the counterculture of southern California and around the world. Lonnie, for a time, was at the center of it all, baptizing, preaching, being used by God for “such a time as this.”  My early spiritual years and ministry were formed by this mighty move of the Holy Spirit, and I will always be thankful that God chooses the most unlikely characters to further His Kingdom.

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned … Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.  Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. …You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart…” —Psalm 51, a prayer of David

1. Peterson, Eugene H., Leap Over A Wall, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) p. 5.


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