|
[back]
February
Resting in the Redeemer
Dear Friends,
Do you think that the Christian life is hard? If so, what makes it hard, and if not,
why does it seem so hard for so many professing Christians?
We
can begin to consider this matter in terms of the context of the question and
in terms of our defining what we mean by the word hard. Regarding
context, the Bible alerts us to the fact that it is through many tribulations
that we must enter the kingdom of God. The sufferings of the apostles in the Book of Acts illustrate some of
the sufferings of the faithful. Yet, do we always suffer? Is our calling in Christ always to be under the yoke of stress,
straining, persecution, affliction, and sacrifice? And are these things the only elements that compose the
Christian life? The true context
in which we face the challenges and difficulties inherent in our pilgrimage of
faith is one composed of trials and triumphs, sorrows and joys, pains and holy
pleasures. Therefore, when we
understand that the Christian life contains such mixed elements, we cannot and
should not think or characterize the life of faith as being hard in the sense
of it being unalloyed pain and suffering.
While
the Bible is clear that the tribulations of the saints can be many, varied, and
at times exquisitely painful and profoundly perplexing, the Word of God is
emphatic in stating that all of our pains serve useful and sanctifying purposes
in our lives. The thorns we cry to
our God to remove from our flesh serve as prods to direct us to the abundantly
sufficient grace of our Lord. The
afflictions we endure come upon us by no accident or negligence on God’s part,
but are ordained by Him for the production in us of an eternal weight of glory. It is when we appropriate the divine
grace that we begin to rejoice and boast in our afflictions and weaknesses,
seeing the connection between them and God’s glory and our good. It is when we feed upon the sure hope
of that glory in view of which all of our sufferings should be considered as
momentary, light, and, in fact, beneficial producers of glorious gain, that we
begin to count ourselves blessed when we suffer for Christ’s sake.
But
there is more to this matter than our faithful appropriation of the truths and
promises of God’s Word and the enabling grace that He minister’s to us by His
Spirit. There is something
intensely and essentially personal that transforms the pain of our sufferings
into the blessedness of glory. We
are not simply called to be nourished on grace and hope but rather to be
strengthened by these qualities as they come to us in relation to their source,
namely, our living and loving God. It is God’s grace that enables us not only to endure our thorns in the
flesh or resign ourselves to them, but also to rejoice in them. It is the hope that God gives us that
feeds and fills us with joyful anticipation of the day when we shall see the
face of our Redeemer, whose loving self-sacrifice has washed away all of our
sins, whose healing hand shall wipe away all of our tears, and whose glorious
beauty shall perfectly and perpetually captivate us and hold us in the matrix
of the holy love that blessedly holds the three persons of our triune God in
most perfect and joyful unity.
There
is a priority that we should ever observe when we live our lives in Christ. There are principles of godliness and
ordinances of divine grace, but above and before these is the living and loving
person of God. It is neither by
the principles of godliness nor by the ordinances of divine grace that we are
saved. It is by the person of God
through the ordinances of His grace.
Jesus
calls us to come to Him and promises
us that He will give us rest. While we can only truly come to know
Christ and His will and provision for us through His written Word, we should
ever bear in mind that above that written Word stands the living Word. It is that living Word who has loved us
and given Himself for us. It is
that living Word who has reconciled us to God and brought us into His loving
family and given to us glorious, eternal, abundant life.
We
should learn to perceive in the written Word of Scripture not only the
propositional directives and declared truths, incentives, commands, and
prohibitions of God, but also the powerful and intensely pleasing aroma, the
sweet, refreshing breath, the loving hand, the compassionate and merciful heart
of our God. Although Scripture
informs our prayers, we do not pray to the Bible, but to the living God who has
revealed Himself to us in Scripture. When Paul says that he can do all things, he does not say that he does
so through the directives of Scripture alone, but rather through the Christ
whose loving divine person and reconciling work form the central testimony of
all Scripture.
God
has given us His Word, not so that in it we might find the ladder of our
performance that leads to heaven, but rather so that we might apprehend the
beauty of our holy, loving, and redeeming Lord. It is our God who has made and redeemed us for Himself. Our hearts are restless and our lives
appear hard, until we find our rest, our peace, our contentment, our joy, our
all in Him, in whose yoke we find felicity throughout our pilgrimage on earth
(Mt. 11: 28-30), and in whose presence in glory is fullness of joy, and
enduring pleasures (Ps. 16:11).
Faithfully yours,
William Harrell
[back]
|
Sunday
Morning Worship 10:30 AM
Evening Worship
6:30 PM
Wednesday
Christian Education
7:00 PM
Saturday
Congregational Prayer Meeting
7:00 PM |
