"Do not be afraid, I am with you, " God says. How do I not be afraid, when I am faced with the reality of atrocities, the reality of all the evil that I see? Today's sermon answered that question, and after a week of stress and fatigue, I was ready to hear it. The passage was on Revelation 2:8-11, about Jesus comforting the church of Smyrna in their afflictions, and commending them on their holding fast to their convictions, in spite of all of the personal loss they may or were experiencing because of it. Our pastor made the point that the true condition of our hearts are revealed when we are tested and tried. That is when the truth of what really undergirds my life comes out. It is easy enough to be happy and thankful when all is well, but can I really praise God when things are going wrong and everything just sucks (from my perspective)? Can I really believe in His goodness when I see all of the crap that happens in life, and all of the junk people have to deal with every day? How do I speak of the love of Christ to people who have been abused, people who are living on the streets, people who are alone and isolated, people who have weathered such horrible things? If it weren't for one truth, it would all be silly platitudinous nonsense. The truth of what Christ did proves His love, no matter the circumstance, no matter the situation. I can trust Him and what He is doing because He voluntarily entered into this world, gave up everything that He had, all because He loved His people so much, and God so much, that He couldn't stand that the gulf called sin should continue to separate them. Bad things have happened in my life, as have they happened in everyone's lives. It would impossible to believe in a loving and just God, much less a god at all, if it weren't for the reality of His sacrifice, the awesomeness of the gift of His life in exchange for mine. Jesus takes my suffering personally; He willingly enters into it more deeply than anyone ever could, and then rescues me from it. Most often, the circumstances don't change. I'm still in the crud. But my heart changes and I can see that even if I can't see the big picture, God can, and He has a great purpose for each and every event that has occurred or will occur in my life. For many, many of the things that happened, someone couldn't pay me enough money to ever have to go through again; I am just thankful that I made it to the other side in one piece. But I can see now that I am who I am today because of those things, and God has somehow made what was intended for evil for my good. Amazing. He suffered in the garden of Gethsemane for me. He hung on the cross for me, experienced the wrath of God for me. My heart breaks and weeps when I think of His pain and anguish, and what love that shows. And my heart breaks when I hear His name maligned, even in my own head sometimes, because we don't truly realize Who He is. Truly a Man of sorrows, but also a Man of great joy. It is this joy that gets me through the week. It is this love that wraps me up tight and holds me close, even when I feel like I am so alone. It is this Jesus who holds out His hand to me and lifts me up when I have screwed up for the umpteenth time. Because of this, I can trust God in my present circumstances, even if they are hard and seemingly immovable, and I can trust Him for my future. Because I have such myopic vision, I can't see the big picture. But I know Someone Who can, and I take comfort in that.
From C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity":
"Someone once asked me, "Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?" The better stuff a creature is made of -- the cleverer and stronger and freer it is -- then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. How did it go wrong? The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first -- wanting to be the center, wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of satan, that was the sin He taught the human race. What satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods" -- could set up on their own as if they had created themselves -- be their own masters -- invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history -- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery -- the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline; now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy apart from Him. God cannot give us a happiness and a peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. Jesus claimed to be God. God, in the language and paradigm of the Jews, meant the Being outside the world Who made it and was infinitely different from everything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so many times: He forgives sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is "humble and meek" and we believe Him, not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings. I am trying to prevent here anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. Your must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
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