Turning Off the Meow Button
By Linda Rex
October 6, 2019, Proper 22—My daughter has a furry cat friend named Ramen who has a sparkling personality and an inquisitive nature. Whenever she gets stuck in a place she cannot escape from, such as a pet carrier or a room, she is very vocal about her desire for more freedom to explore. Sometimes it is necessary to limit her ability to move around, even though doing so means we will be treated to a long-winded meowing session.
There are times when I act like Ramen. Situations or relational necessities limit my freedom to do things the way I prefer. People, and even God, don’t handle things the way I think they need to be handled. I get stuck in a place I’d rather not be and it is so easy to let everyone in my life know my frustration, anger, and anxiety.
How hard it is to wait on God! It seems that we pray for this or that and the only thing we get in return is a long wait. Sometimes a very, very long wait. Waiting is not our strong point, especially those of us who are caught up in this fast-paced, techno-driven society. So instead of patiently waiting, we fret. We moan and complain. We throw up our hands in frustration and disappointment and take matters into our own hands. And that’s when things go wrong.
It’s hard to get our mind around the idea that we have a loving, generous, compassionate Dad who is looking out for our best interests. It is really hard to see this, much less believe it, when everything tangible and visible in our lives is in chaos or falling apart. When our expectations are not being met, when we cannot control the outcome of what is happening, then we start our meowing, thinking that the more noise we make, the better the outcome will be. And when that doesn’t work, we take over, doing our best to fix the situation ourselves.
In Luke 17:5-10, Jesus told his disciples that if they had the faith of a mustard seed, they could tell a mulberry tree to be moved and planted in the ocean and it would happen. Then he said that when a master has a slave come in from working in the field, that slave tends to the master’s needs not the master to the slave’s needs. No matter what the slave may have done that day, in spite of all his good effort, his worth or value is not in his performance—he has only done what was expected of him.
It seems that even the smallest amount of faith will accomplish great things. The problem is that we depend upon our own faith, not on Christ and his perfect faith in his Abba. There is no doubt in Jesus’ mind that his Father is good, compassionate and gracious. He is convinced that whatever is needful and good for us, his Abba will do. So, he trusts him implicitly. Our faith, in comparison, is often even smaller than mustard seed in size. We need Jesus to give us his perfect trust in his heavenly Father.
We can do all we want to in order to gain our Abba’s approval and acceptance. But if we are working the “do good so God will bless me” angle, we are going to be sorely disappointed. Whatever we do as God’s children is merely what is expected of us—we cannot coerce God into changing his mind by our human efforts, nor by our incessant demands on him. What God does or does not do has its basis in his nature, which is love.
Don’t get me wrong—God listens. He hears. He feels our pain and understands our struggles. In Jesus, he shares all the difficulties of our human existence. By the Spirit, he is present in every situation and circumstance. His heart is moved with compassion for us when we are in pain or in dire straits. He wants to help us, deliver us, and restore us.
But God is not a robot or a machine. The minute we approach our difficulties from the point of view “if I do this, then he has to do that”, of cause and effect, then we are caught up in magical thinking. We are turning God into an idol, forgetting that Abba is a divine Person, with his own will, preferences, thoughts and plans which are far above what our feeble human minds can grasp. God is free to do what is loving, gracious, and just. That just might mean he says no or it may mean we have to wait or be stuck in a difficult situation for an extended period of time.
Waiting on God is difficult. But when we surrender to the waiting, seeking silence in God’s presence rather than meowing at him for hours on end, we find that God all of a sudden becomes very present in the situation by the Spirit. As we slow down and wait silently on God, even taking time for silence in our prayers to Abba, we begin to realize the loving presence of Abba in the midst of our struggle.
Sometimes we don’t have an answer to the difficulty because we have never been silent long enough to hear what God is saying to us. Like our little kitty who just keeps meowing, we drown out the tender loving voice of the Spirit telling us all will be well and the solution is coming. Instead of being angry about the limitations we are facing, we could be grateful for God’s presence and care in the midst of them, and be reassured that God is presently at work in the situation bringing about his purposes and plans. Silent waiting brings our hearts and minds into resonance with God’s heart and mind, calming us and giving us peace.
Waiting in the silence with Jesus means trusting Abba to do the most loving, gracious and just thing in the situation that he can possibly do. It means having the faith to believe that God loves us and wants our best in every circumstance. And if we struggle with trust, we turn to Jesus, and draw upon his perfect trust in his Father.
I’m thinking this would be a good day to stop the noise and to be silent with God. What is it that we’ve been waiting for him to do? What things in our lives are limiting us and preventing us from being free to follow God’s lead into a new place? Perhaps it is time to stop the meowing and just sit silently with the One who already has the solution in motion and find out what he has in mind, surrendering ourselves to his wishes.
Dearest Abba, forgive us for being so noisy about not getting our way and not being able to make things go the way we want them to go. Grant us the grace to sit in silence with you, to be open and receptive to your Spirit, and obedient to the words of life you give us. Enable us to rest each day in your serenity and peace, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“Rest in the LORD and wait patiently for Him; Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, / Because of the man who carries out wicked schemes. Cease from anger and forsake wrath; / Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.” Psalm 37:7-8 NASB
“The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, / To the person who seeks Him. / It is good that he awaits silently / For the salvation of the Lord.” Lamentations 3:25-26 NASB
Real Life—Richly Supplied, We Give
By Linda Rex
September 29, Proper 21— On the streets of Nashville I often see well-dressed people driving Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs at the same intersection with people in ragged clothing holding signs that say “homeless” or “help me”. At Good News Fellowship, we are often faced with the challenge, and the blessing, of helping those who cannot or will not help themselves.
One of the marks of a healthy community is the way it handles the radical difference between those who have and those who do not. The early Christian church handled these profound differences in a way which was counter to their Roman culture—a culture in which those who were wealthy were given a more elevated status than those who did not. It was not unusual for a wealthy person to sponsor or support someone less fortunate than themselves, but that person wasn’t normally elevated to a place of equal status with their benefactor. The believers in the early church, however, understood that in Christ, we are all equals, all members of one body.
God’s way of doing things is so different than ours. Today, when it comes to money and being rich, we often see extremes among people of the Christian faith. Wealth may be seen either as an evil to be rejected or as a sign of one’s favor with God because of one’s obedience and goodness. Either extreme is not how God meant us to view wealth. Wealth is given, the Word of God says, to be enjoyed, but also for the purpose of doing good and sharing with others.
Having wealth or nice things is great—it makes life pleasant and enables us to do a lot of things we could not do otherwise. But the problem with being rich is that often our focus turns away from the God who gives the wealth and blessings and turns to the riches themselves. People can get so absorbed in accumulating and maintaining their wealth, and enjoying it, that they miss the whole point of it all—they are a beloved child of a generous and loving heavenly Father, a dad who wants to share all of his blessings with them.
If we took the time to turn away from our abundance and wealth for a moment and to turn to Jesus, we would see a wealthy, abundantly blessed Son, who did not for a moment count any of his good stuff worth holding on to. We read in Philippians 2:5-11 how the Word of God, the divine Son of God, temporarily set aside the privileges of his divinity for our sake. He knew we would be and were caught in the poverty and darkness of our sin, and evil had us in its grip. Death was the result of our stubborn willfulness and pride. Because of this, he set it all aside to join us where we were to bring us to be where he was.
The one gift above all others the Son of God wished to share with us, which supersedes any physical blessing or gift he could give us, is the ability to participate in his perfect, intimate relationship with his Abba. He and the Father always have been, are, and always will be, one in the Spirit. This is the relationship we were created to participate in and which we seem to always trade in for the tangible things of this life.
In this culture, at least in this country today, we are surrounded with so much abundance, that it is hard to see beyond our human existence. We have so many human solutions to our problems that we lose site of the role God is meant to play in all of this.
We may believe we don’t really need God’s healing when we can go see a doctor, or a specialty surgeon, visit a hospital, or even see a psychotherapist. All of these are excellent ways to take care of our health, and yes, we should do them when we can, but what about starting the whole process with the one Being who has created us, given us life, and who can heal us, however others may or may not be involved in the healing process? Wouldn’t it be more important to have our heavenly Daddy with us through the whole circumstance, walking with us and guiding us, helping the doctors and nurses as they give us care?
Many people grew up in families where the only food available was eggs from the chickens, milk from the cow, and food from the garden. They survived quite well on the little that they had because they had an implicit faith in God and in his provision. Today if we don’t have our favorite foods on the table or in the fridge, we think we are starving. The blessings we have so easily become more important than our relationship with the God who provides them. What has happened to us that we have lost this simple connection between ourselves and God, and knowing that we are his beloved children and he is our loving Father?
What about filling our cupboards and refrigerators with food? I do meet people who are lucky to have one good meal a week. I rarely ever hear them say that they asked God for their daily bread—to take care of this simple need. Strangely enough, we often expect other people to take care of us rather than simply calling on and trusting in our Abba Father to provide. I’ve heard many stories from people over the years who told about how God provided for them in a variety of ways—often through other people, but without them being asked to do it—it was solely a work of the Spirit. Wouldn’t that build your trust in and love for your Abba if you saw him provide for you without you first asking other people to take care of you?
Getting back to my point, I see that we are so blessed with so much, but it is never quite enough. We experience life in this world as a glass half empty rather than half full when our focus is on what we do or don’t have rather than on the One who gives it to us to enjoy and to share. Jesus came so we could have life abundant—not with overflowing coffers of wealth, but with an abundant overflow of God’s love and grace and the ability to participate individually, and as brothers and sisters, in a personal relationship with our heavenly Father through Jesus in the Spirit.
By all means, we should enjoy those blessings God gives us. We can enjoy the benefits of living in America, experiencing an ease and pleasure so many in the world wish they could share in, and do so without guilt and shame. These are God’s gifts to us.
But God says to us that the greatest treasure of all is that which is stored up for us in heaven when we take the abundance we have and share it with those less fortunate than us. We, along with Jesus, join others in their poverty and darkness to bring them up into fellowship with us, into a place of equality and unity in our uniqueness. We share what we have been given, not because we are asked to or expected to, but because Christ is at work in us, in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, giving us a desire to share what we have been given with those around us and to share in our Abba’s generous heart toward his beloved children.
The divine life we are called into involves both receiving and giving. There is an ever-flowing pouring out and pouring into that are part of the perichoretic love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, and we are included in that life as we trust in Christ and follow the leading of the Spirit. All we have, all we are, we receive as a gift from Abba. Do we receive these gifts with joy and gratitude, as gifts from a loving Father? Do we bless our Abba with love and fellowship in response? And, today, how would Abba want us to share his abundant gifts with others? Are we being obedient to the Spirit’s promptings to share?
Dear Abba, thank you for all your many gifts and blessings, and most of all, for including us in your life with Jesus in the Spirit. Give us a heart of generosity and an understanding of the transience of physical wealth so we will hold these things loosely and freely share them with others. Keep our eyes on you and our hearts enraptured with your love, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
“Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.” 1 Timothy 6:17-19 NASB
See also Luke 16:19–31.
Sharing Our Wounds
By Linda Rex
September 22, 2019, Proper 20—One of the most painful things I have experienced over the years is going through the consequences of a bad decision or decisions I have made, especially with regards to my significant relationships. It seems as though some consequences never end, even though we may have changed or done our best to make amends for the error done.
We often believe, however incorrectly, that if we just do the right thing from now on, our life will be much better. I’d like to say that is the case, but sometimes we have to go through the hard and messy stuff for a while before we see the benefits of changing the way we live.
The reality is that as broken human beings, our bent is toward doing things in a self-centered, self-preserving, self-fulfilling way. When we discover that life wasn’t meant to be lived with ourselves at the center and try to live a Christ-centered life, we often discover there are shackles and traps we have not seen that we have been caught in that we cannot escape easily and on our own.
As human beings, life can be wonderful, and then it can be hell. Sometimes the hell in our lives is the result of our own choices. Sometimes it is the result of the choices of those around us. Either way, we do have occasions when we wrestle with the ugliness of our broken humanity and the consequences of sin.
Here in the Western world today we do not always see the immediate consequences of our choices. One can live for many years on the edge financially before we finally hit the bottom. A person can play by the rules a long time and successfully hide an addiction, but in due time, the truth will come out, exposing a life of deceit, unfaithfulness, and/or worse.
Some types of our brokenness is socially acceptable and so we see no need to change anything, not realizing the harm we are doing to ourselves or to others. But consequences happen. We will at some point have to deal with the truth about God and about ourselves and come face-to-face with the reality we are not meant to be at the center of everything—Christ is.
The people of Judah came to a place where all they trusted in and counted on was going to be swept away. Starvation, war, enslavement—these were the consequences they were facing. Jeremiah grieved with the suffering of his people. He knew the sin of the people was very grave—unfaithfulness to their covenant God—and the consequences they were beginning to feel would only get worse. Why could they not see the path they were on? Jeremiah mourned—he lamented the fallen condition of his people, longing for their healing and renewal.
What Judah was called by Jeremiah to see was that, just as he shared their pain and suffering, so God also shared their pain and suffering. It was not enough for God to look upon his people from a distance and see them suffering the consequences of their choices. No, at the perfect time, God came and actually entered into the midst of their suffering. God in human flesh in the person of Jesus was Abba’s ultimate answer to the suffering of his people. Even though God’s people could never seem to get things right, still God would come himself and set things right.
Truly, our sinfulness as human beings is a sickness only the divine Physician can heal. The apostle Paul reminds us that Jesus became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. We cannot and do not get ourselves right with God—Jesus came and made us right with God, and makes us right as we trust in his perfect, complete gift of himself in our place and on our behalf.
What we have is a Physician who is also the one who is sick. He became the patient, bearing the full weight of our illness and the consequences of our sin, including death on a cross, and brought us complete restoration and renewal in his very person.
When Jesus rose from the grave and ascended to his Father, he brought our broken humanity to a new place—to the place where by faith we live eternally in union and communion with the Father in the Spirit. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit from his Father so we could share in his perfect relationship with Abba and be able to live the other-centered, Christ-centered lives we were created to participate in.
This does not mean that when we trust in Christ that all the consequences of our failures to love magically disappear. It seems we often have to wrestle with these for years as part of our calling to share in the sufferings of Christ. There are times when God graciously removes the consequences of our choices—healing venereal disease, curing alcoholism, or removing a hunger for cocaine. But this is not always the case. Sometimes our battle against such pulls is the Physician’s very cure and is the means by which he intends us to participate in him providing the cure for others with the same struggle.
The biggest take-away here is, God is present in the midst of our consequences. He may or may not remove or minimize them—we should ask, but accept he may not. He shares our struggle and our pain—as we allow. And when we trust in Christ and are baptized, we are placed within the body of Christ to share this journey with others who are facing the same struggles. We are meant to participate in a spiritual community—a hospital for sinners, you might say—where we are all, as broken human beings, finding our healing and renewal in Christ.
We have a divine Physician who is on call for us 24/7 and who cares about the smallest concern of our lives. We probably ought to listen to him and follow his guidelines for the care of our souls—to feed and nourish properly the temple of the Spirit and our minds and hearts. We probably ought to live the way he created us to live—loving him wholeheartedly and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
But at any moment, no matter the joy or pain, he is present in the Spirit to share what we are going through, to help us bear whatever we face, even if it is the consequences of our bad choices. He never meant for us to go through life alone, but always to be at the center, sharing every part of it with us.
Dearest Abba, thank you for giving us your Son as our on-call Physician, who is always present and available to us at any time. Thank you, Jesus, for coming yourself and bearing our troubles and trials, and freeing us from the shackles of evil, sin, and death on the cross, rising to bring us all to share in your unity with the Father in the Spirit. Turn our hearts to you, Lord Jesus, to trust you in faith. Fill us anew with your Spirit, giving us the heart to live in the truth of who we are as image-bears of our God who is love. Amen.
“I hurt with the hurt of my people. I mourn and am overcome with grief. Is there no medicine in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why is there no healing for the wounds of my people?” Jeremiah 8:21-22 NLT
Changing Our Inner Lens
By Linda Rex
September 15, 2019, Proper 19—The parable about the lost coin nearly always brings to my mind the many times when I have lost something important and have searched all over in my attempts to find it. As I get older, I’m discovering that it’s getting easier for me to lose things and harder for me to find them. I confess that on occasion I have had to use my landline phone to call my cellphone because I could not find it anywhere.
My daughter dreads hearing me say that I can’t find my glasses because she knows they could be just about anywhere. She immediately checks to make sure they are not on my head—sometimes things are not as badly lost as we think they are. Sometimes we just need to change our viewpoint or our perspective, or what we believe to be true.
This parable of the lost coin shows the heart of our loving Abba, who is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that each of his children has a place at his table. It’s bad enough that we believe he’s looking for reasons to exclude us, but then we also often believe that he is indifferent as to whether or not we’re even present in his life. Neither are true.
The coin the woman searched for was a drachma, worth about a day’s wages. Back when I was an hourly employee earning minimum wage, losing a day’s wages was equivalent to not having any water that month or not being able to put gas in the car. When I lost a day’s wages or lost a valuable check, I was concerned. I needed every penny I earned. I had bills to pay and kids to feed and care for.
The diligence with which the house got searched increased with the value of the item lost. The urgency with which this woman searched her house was a reflection of the value she placed upon that lost coin. It is a reflection of the passion with which our Abba searches for his lost ones. Finding those who are his lost ones and bringing them home to be with him was very important to Abba—so important that the Word of God, his Son, came into our cosmos, shared in our humanity and our suffering, and brought us home to be with Abba forever.
There is no person today who is completely and totally lost, who is not found in Christ. On God’s side, he has searched out and found each and every one of us—including us in the humanity of our risen Lord. Our lostness is a matter of unbelief, not of spiritual reality. What we believe about God, about ourselves, and about who Jesus is and what he did, is critical. If we believe we are lost, forsaken, and abandoned, we will live as though that is true. But if we believe Christ has come and brought us home to his Father (which he has), then we will live as though that is true, and live in the joy, peace, and hope of God as we participate in Christ’s perfect relationship with his Father in the Spirit.
Now sometimes we can be so sure of our own goodness and righteousness that we don’t realize we have wandered away from the God who loves us. This was what Jesus faced when the scribes and Pharisees began to criticize him for eating with sinners. When we begin to delineate between righteous people and sinners, including ourselves in the righteous group, we are in a dangerous place. We are declaring ourselves as having no need for Jesus and for what he did for us. We are denying reality.
Jesus emphasized our need to see ourselves accurately—as sinners in need of grace. As long as we believe we are righteous and do not need to be saved, we have no need of Jesus. We can live in this place of denial all our lives, but there will come a point where we will need to face the reality that apart from Jesus, we are lost. Apart from his finished work in his life, death, resurrection and ascension, we don’t have life today or hope for the future. We need to accept the truth that our eternity, and our present, are wrapped up in Jesus—he is our life. He is our right relationship with God and others.
There is great joy in heaven, Jesus said, when someone throws away the blinders and begins to see themselves with clear vision. Confessing the truth about ourselves paves the way for us to begin to live and walk in truth, in the spiritual realities in which we were included when Jesus came in our place on our behalf. And living in the reality that we are sinners saved by grace, beloved adopted children of the Father, changes how we treat those around us.
Instead of focusing on the failures, faults, and weaknesses of those around us, we focus on Christ—on him being at work in each person and in their lives by the Spirit, helping them come to see and believe that they too have been found and brought home to the Father. Rather than offering ridicule, criticism or condemnation, we offer encouragement, comfort, and understanding. Rather than rejecting or belittling them, we pray for them and offer them appropriate support.
It is in these ways that we participate with Jesus in searching for the lost and bringing them home to the Father. God has already done the hard part in the finished work of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Now we get to join in as we follow Christ and the lead of the Spirit as God works in each person’s life to bring them to faith. We pray for them and share the good news with them. We share the love of God, extending the grace and mercy of Jesus, and trust God to finish what he already has begun in each person’s life.
So, today, how do we need to reconsider the way we look ourselves and the people around us? Are we using a clear and accurate lens? Do we see things through the lens of Jesus Christ? We may need to ask Abba for new glasses—or maybe we just need to clean the grime off of them so we can see things the way they really are. Either way, we may just discover that what we believe is lost has already been found.
Dear Abba, thank you for so diligently searching for us, finding us, and bringing us home to you. Give us clear vision, the lens of your Son Jesus Christ. Fill us anew with the Spirit of truth so we not only see the spiritual realities, but also the truth about those you have placed in our lives. Enable us to love them as you have loved us, through Jesus our Lord and by your Spirit. Amen.
“Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’… I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance….In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.’” Luke 15:2, 7, 10 NASB
Accepting the Cost
By Linda Rex
September 8, 2019, Proper 18—As I was reading the passage for next Sunday, I remembered a scene from when I was driving home from Cookeville to Nashville recently. It was located in a small farming community nestled between several tree-covered peaks. In the middle of a large pasture near some other houses sat a wooden frame which looked as though it had been abandoned, with new pieces of lumber scattered among broken pieces from an old farmhouse. What had been built looked great, but sat abandoned, with no one working on it, with no equipment around, and no sign from what I would see that anyone was planning to finish what they started.
If we are honest with ourselves, there are times when we feel like that unfinished building—abandoned, forgotten, with no hope of ever becoming what we believe we really ought to be or could be. We may have had great plans of overcoming this, of developing that, of doing that good deed, but we so often come up short. What we may feel like is worn out, burned out failures at life.
When we think about picking up and carrying our own cross daily, this is often what we feel like. Living life as a Christian and trying to do the right thing all the time is difficult. I’m grateful I do not have to carry Christ’s cross—I’m still trying to fully understand how to carry my own. And this is why it is important to understand what Jesus meant when he said this.
We often assume that the Christian life is meant to be a struggle against sin, a war to overcome the evil within ourselves. This makes our Christian walk rather self-centered, as an effort to become what we are not. But this is not really a helpful way of seeing things, and not what Jesus meant when he told us to carry our cross and to follow him.
What would be helpful for us to understand is that when Jesus told us to pick up our cross daily and to follow him, he was not telling us something we had to do on our own all by ourselves. When a contractor sets out to build a house, he usually does not attempt to do so all by himself. No, he has someone come to do the plumbing, someone to do the electricity, maybe even a few carpenters and carpet layers come to help him out. In other words, he doesn’t attempt the task all by himself—he does it in community.
In the same way, Jesus calls us into community, into fellowship with the Trinity, where we live life in Christ by the Spirit as participants in his own intimate father-son relationship with his Abba. Jesus says no other relationship should have this precedence in our life—we love all others less in comparison. As participants in the divine life and love, we don’t build our lives under our own power according to our own plans. Whatever we do coincides directly with who we are as God’s beloved adopted children who share in Christ’s perfect and holy sonship.
Jesus also calls us into the community of believers. We are not meant to go through the struggles to live as a follower of Christ alone. The Spirit calls us together into a community so that we can encourage each other and lift each other up, and when our burdens become too difficult for us to carry alone, we have someone to come alongside us to help and strengthen us. We aren’t alone, but rather are called into spiritual community, the church, which is made up of brothers and sisters in Christ who, like us, are beloved adopted children of Abba.
In other words, the life of a follower of Jesus becomes a matter of finding and living out our true identity in Christ as Abba’s beloved adopted children rather than seeking to gain acceptance by our religious performance and moral goodness. We don’t depend upon our ability to do what is necessary—the cost is too great because we will fail. We depend solely upon Christ, walking by faith in him, and living and walking in the Spirit rather than in our flesh. Our focus is not on how well we are doing or not doing, but rather on Jesus Christ, and how he has done it, is doing it in us by the Spirit, and will finish it when we are glorified at his return.
What this means is, the cost of our salvation has been paid by Jesus. The cost to us is the laying down of our life and the receiving of Jesus in our place and on our behalf. This means we cease to be the center, other people cease to be the center, and the cares of this life are set completely aside—Jesus Christ himself is now the center of our life. We are baptized in his baptism, acknowledging he lived our life, we died in his death, we rose in his resurrection, and we ascended in his ascension. We eat the bread and drink the wine of communion, thankfully celebrating that he is all we need—his life for our life. He became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
When we count the cost of following Christ, we aren’t examining ourselves to see whether or not we have what it takes to follow through to the end. The reality is we don’t. That’s why God had from the beginning, before all was made, intended to join our life with his life through the incarnation. God in human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ is our assurance that we have what it takes—we turn to Jesus, again and again, daily relying upon him to finish what he began in us. We, as temples of the Spirit, are in process, and in the end, the beautiful bride, the universal fellowship of all believers, will shine with God’s glory in his presence forever.
So, the question for today is, what do you need to lay down so that you are solely picking up your daily reliance upon Jesus? What is it that you need to relinquish or surrender control over so that Christ can rule in your heart and life? What relationships need to be given healthy boundaries so Christ becomes your focus instead someone else being the center of your life? You are the beloved adopted child of Abba and by the Spirit you share in Jesus’ perfect relationship with him. Accept your cross of life in Christ daily, and follow him wherever he goes. Let him do the heavy lifting—you enjoy the journey.
Dear Abba, thank you for including us in your perfect relationship with your Son Jesus. Thank you that by the Spirit, we participate in Christ’s perfected humanity. What a blessing that it is all up to him and not all up to us! Enable us this day, and each day, to lay down all our human efforts at righteousness and surrender fully to dependency upon Christ alone. Enable us to establish healthy relationships, keeping Christ at the center of our lives. Grant us the grace to yield control completely to you, through Jesus our Lord and by your Spirit. Amen.
“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” Luke 14:27 NASB
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