Worse than You Think

When a fellow believer tells me how disenchanted and depressed they feel because they fell and did some bad things or don't even seem to have a heart for God anymore, I hope I can always remember to tell them this:

"Cheer up. You're much worse than you think."

The only thing that happened is that you discovered a little more of what already resides in your heart. But God has seen it all the whole time and still delivered up His Son for you.

The power of the Gospel is not in it's ability to make us feel good about ourselves or minimize our sin. It is in its ability to slay the old Adam with the truth of our foolish condition and create in us a man of faith, who doesn't live for himself but for Him who died and rose from the dead for him.

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The Cross and Our Hurts

In the suffering and death of Christ on the cross, we have three loud voices spoken to our hurts. First, we have a voice that understands what it is to suffer. He was rejected unfairly. He was the object of ridicule and whispers behind the back. He was betrayed. He suffered an agonizing death. He identifies with our hurt, and, as those who belong to Him, we identify with His. Some only want to stop at this, however, and therefore don't find what it takes to heal. They want to be affirmed, validated (which, depending on the wound, can be understandable) but not to move on and change. Second, there is a loud voice that proclaims from the cross, "This was required for YOU." The cross of Christ is the public indictment of our sinfulness. We see that we also *cause* hurts, even out of the hurts we've received. We see that we also transgress against God and neighbor. We need forgiveness, too. In this way, the cross exposes our blindness, for a person who is f

CRAS TIBI

I remember kneeling down closer to make out the Latin inscription on the grave stone, as we all walked about the Charter St. Cemetery in Salem. This particular stone belonged to Christian Hunter (died March 18, 1676), the first wife of Captain Richard More, the only one of the Mayflower Pilgrims to take up residence in and be buried in Salem, MA. The words etched just below the primitively macabre winged-skull read, "HODIE MIHI, CRAS TIBI". My Latin is a little rusty, so thanks to Google I was able to translate into the sobering English phrase: "Today me, tomorrow you." It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks and cuts through all the layers of "stuff" that constantly occupies our minds and hearts. It makes me think of what the writer of Ecclesiastes said (Ecc 7:2): It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. As on

My Crutch

It's interesting that one of the criticisms of non-religious folks is that we're using "religion" as a "crutch." Years ago, I would have become defensive and argued at the idea, but today I happily admit that Jesus is like a crutch but so much more. Why the change of heart? Often we're tempted to think that our spiritual walk with God is a lot like physical therapy for person recovering from a crippling injury. When many of us first come to believe, we imagine we're like someone who just awakened from a horrible accident and received the diagnosis that our legs don't work. We rely heavily on God, especially at first, like a recovering man would with crutches or a walker. And we imagine that as we work our spiritual muscles, as we do our disciplines and try hard to be good people, as we do more spiritual therapy, we get stronger. God lets us walk through some hard times too, perhaps, and that gives us the extra push to work out a little hard

Mathetes

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