Tag Archives: devotionals

The Word

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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

– John 1:14 (ESV)

I don’t think I’ll be able to do justice to this passage, because the majesty of this truth is something that I can only grasp for short periods of time, if at all. I still look through a glass darkly. And even what I can grasp of this passage is too large for me, too breathtaking.

The Gospel of John starts with the following famous sentence, stated so simply, and already we are in waters that are too deep:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This remarkable statement is followed closely by

“All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

The Word that was with God and was God. Through Him all things were created, and (with the characteristic Hebrew rephrasing of important truths) “without him was not any thing made that was made.”

How mysterious, how awesome is this Word that John refers to. The Word of God – the great Logos through which He created the universe. The Word that was with God in the beginning, and was God. In here we begin to glimpse the amazing eternal relationship of Father and Son, of the One who speaks all things into existence and the One who is the very Word of God, through which

all things were made.

These are deep waters and high heavenly spaces which we are attempting to navigate. These words, written in the straightforward style of John the beloved disciple, contain a mystery, one that believers will have all eternity to enjoy. Because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

To have received the very words of God in revelation, as the Hebrews did from the beginnings of their history, was in itself an awesome thing. But who would have expected the Word of God to actually come and live with us? What an audacious act our Lord committed! No wonder Jesus was such an enigma to the religious leaders of His day. No wonder He confounded their preset ideas of how God would fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament.

But much wonder when we think of His revolutionary act of love, humility, and sacrifice. The grace and truth of God, embodied in a tabernacle of flesh, able to touch, to heal, to laugh and cry with His followers. Able to kneel and pray, to be tired, to be hungry. Able to suffer, beyond anything we can imagine.

This is the glory of God. I’m learning more and more that, when you break the universe down to its basic truth, the glory of God is all that matters, and it is what all things point to. And we have beheld His glory.

In Jesus.

Barren no longer

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There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. And his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son.

– Judges 13:2-3 (ESV)

Have you ever noticed how many times the scenario above has played out in Scripture? The Lord visits the barren and declares ”Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive”. Thus spoke the angel to the parents of Sampson, and to the parents of Isaac, and to the parents of John the Baptist. And to how many others?

God could accomplish His purposes through people with the equipment and qualifications to get the job done. But instead he chooses people like Manoah and his wife. Isn’t that His way? That’s what our God does. That’s who He is and one reason I love Him. He is the bringer of life to the barren. That’s why I was, as a young man, drawn to Him. What other god of this world – money, power, sex, human accomplishment, music, sports, fame — cares at all for the barren? None of them do. The gods that men gather to themselves don’t care for the brokenhearted, for the losers, for those whose last thread of hope has just snapped.

A little later in the Judges 13 passage, we witness this marvelous scene:

Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, “Please let us detain you and prepare a young goat for you.” And the angel of the Lord said to Manoah, “If you detain me, I will not eat of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, then offer it to the Lord.” (For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of the Lord.) And Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, “What is your name, so that, when your words come true, we may honor you?” And the angel of the Lord said to him, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” So Manoah took the young goat with the grain offering, and offered it on the rock to the Lord, to the one who works wonders, and Manoah and his wife were watching. And when the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the Lord went up in the flame of the altar. Now Manoah and his wife were watching, and they fell on their faces to the ground.

Judges 13:15-20 (ESV)

“Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” Do you wonder if the angel of the Lord was smiling as He said that? The word translated here “wonderful” can also be translated “incomprehensible” or “beyond understanding”. What an apt description of our Lord: wonderful and beyond understanding. The Creator of all things, perfect in all His ways, comes with grace to the imperfect, barren ones and says “you are barren no longer!” He comes to the dead and raises us to life. He declares the poor to be rich, the weak to be strong. He declares those foolish in the world’s eyes to be wise, and He welcomes the lonely outcast to a place of deep friendship and a seat at the family table of the royal wedding feast. He is “the one who works wonders”.

He came to a world barren of hope, sending His angels on ahead to announce, once again, the birth of a Child to one for whom childbirth was impossible. She wondered “How will this be, since I am a virgin”? The answer to that question is the same answer that the hopeless heart receives when visited with the salvation of God; “the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” The Most High has the power to make possible our impossibilities, to answer all of our “How will this be?” questions. For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given. And His name is Wonderful.

This is Jesus, who breathes life into dry bones, opens deaf ears, makes blind eyes see the beautiful lights and colors of creation again, and restores strength and usefulness to atrophied limbs. There is nothing too hard for Him. He plants hope that grows in the impossible soil of our circumstances.

And He visits the barren ones and declares them barren no longer. Praise His name forever!

The unsatisfied runner

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I’ve been thinking recently about satisfaction. Is it something that can be attained in this life for the follower of Christ?

I would conjecture that many, if not most, lost people are at some level aware of and distressed by the gap in their lives that can only be bridged by God. And I think many people spend a great deal of time and energy trying to fill that gap. They strive to find satisfaction by any means possible and to no avail, thus fulfilling the gloomy observation of the preacher in Ecclesiastes 6: “All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied”.

However, I also believe that there are a number of well-integrated lost people who do feel a great deal of satisfaction with their lives. How a person finds any satisfaction at all outside of a relationship to Christ boggles my mind. But I believe some lost people attain a form of temporal satisfaction.

So what do we make of the unsatisfied Christian? Is being unsatisfied a bad thing? Because I have a confession to make: I feel unsatisfied much of the time. Now, let me explain what I mean: by “unsatisfied” I do not mean “ungrateful”, or even “unhappy”. I have been blessed beyond blessing, and this I know well. Anyone looking at my life circumstances would agree with that. Regardless of the winds of trouble that blow on my life from time to time, God has been very, very good to me. So, with my lot in life I am far from unsatisfied.

And yet there is an uneasiness, a longing for joy in my core that sometimes speaks with a very loud voice. As David wrote:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you;

my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Psalm 63:1 (ESV)

My understanding is that David wrote those words while physically in the desert, and his surroundings served as physical representation of the soul-thirst that he felt for his God. That being said, I believe David would agree: sometimes being in the desert is not such a bad thing. What growth he experienced in the hot sands! I’ve found in my own desert times that I cling to God more tightly, that I seek Him more earnestly than ever, that I do thirst and faint for His presence. And His presence and comfort become very real.

Yet for all that, here on earth we are kept (and for good reason, I believe) from experiencing God in His fullness. We are broken and bent, and even when redeemed and cleansed we are still too frail to endure His glory. While our victory was won for us on the cross and confirmed in the resurrection, there are reasons why we still have to practice faith, hope, and love. Faith, because we trust in what we cannot see. Hope, because what we will be still dwells in the future.

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. – 1 John 3:2 (ESV)

And love, because God is love, and we are God’s expression of Himself to a lost world, and to each other. And then back to Him as well. And Love will endure when there is no longer need for either faith or hope, because all shall be seen, all shall be known, and we will finally have become what He created us to be, unbroken, unbent, glorified and standing joyfully in His presence.

For all my talk of satisfaction and the desire to earnestly seek after Christ, I know that much of it is just that, talk. The world calls me, comfort calls me, compromise calls me. I wonder why I’m not satisfied and the uncomfortable answer is that, while no follower of Christ can be completely satisfied until he is home, I have, in so many ways, made the world my home and become comfortable here in this far land. Therefore the trudge toward my real country has become wearisome. There’s something about running with weights tangling your legs that makes for an unsatisfactory journey.

But my desire, hopefully to be coupled with action, is to set my sights more fully on the finish line ahead, and on the One who completes my faith. To cast off these weights. For joy and satisfaction for the Christian can be felt – even if only in snatches here on earth – when we are running unencumbered. When, smiling and with our head thrown back, we speed on our swift course with the landscape surging past us as we press on toward the goal.

. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:10-14 (ESV)

Orphans and slaves no longer

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For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

Romans 8:15 (ESV)

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God

I John 3:1 (ESV)

I was raised by two loving, biological parents and I’ve never known, physically, the special loneliness of the orphan. And another condition is also foreign to me: I’ve never been a slave and I’ve never, physically speaking, known someone who was a slave, although I do know that slavery still exists in certain dark corners of the earth.

Still, the act of reading these two passages brings with it a spark of recognition. Orphan and slave; I can’t say I don’t know these conditions, because, in truth, I’ve been both.

Sometimes I forget how precious salvation really is. Yet I was once an orphan, alone in this world. I was also a slave to sin. The portrait the world paints of the well-integrated lost person is one of “freedom” – freedom to do what you want, to say what you want, to live a life dedicated to the stimulation of the nerve endings and to the feeding of that most insatiable entity, the human ego. Yet this portrait of freedom is precisely opposite to reality.

The reality is that a life without Christ is one of slavery. Again, slavery is a concept that is thankfully beyond the physical experience of most of us, but citizens of the first century would have been very familiar with it. From the palaces of rulers to the wharfs and marketplaces to the dreaded mines, slaves were everywhere in the Roman Empire. A slave was marked by who owned him, and he had to do his master’s bidding, always. He was not free to live as he chose. Often at the mercy of the whims of a disinterested master, a slave’s life was one of fear.

In the same way, any freedom without Christ is an illusion. Without Christ we are orphans and slaves; in slavery to sin and unable to break its cruel bonds. We are orphans, alone in this world and without an inheritance, without a name, without hope. Alone and afraid in the cold.

Yes, I forget how precious salvation really is. My Father has redeemed me; He has paid the astronomical price to buy me back from slavery and set me free. He has adopted me into His family and given me the rights of sonship.

Those who think becoming a follower of Christ is a form of bondage have bought a lie. Life with Christ is a life of freedom! It is the unspeakable joy of the orphan, disfigured, dirty, long abandoned and without hope in this world, who is singled out in the throng and who hears a loving voice say “This one. This is the one I want. Yes, this is my son.” This one was born in Zion.

It is the speechless joy of the slave, without prospect of release, who hears the words long hoped for but for which he dared not hope, “You are free”, and finds himself standing, unshackled, in the warm sun, blinking back astonished tears and feeling the winds of freedom on his face.

It is the freedom of a beloved child, a child free to laugh and run and play without shame, a child who runs to the door to welcome, with joy and a tight embrace, her Daddy. This is a child who has a name, who has a heritage, an inheritance, security, hope.

It is the freedom that only comes from Jesus, our Savior in every sense of the word. Orphans and slaves look to Him and are adopted and set free.

As one who has worn the rags of slavery and known the loneliness and desperation of the orphan, I can only bow in worship and thankfulness before my Redeemer. I really do forget how precious salvation is sometimes. Thank you Father, for your indescribable gift!

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God!

An “hour” is all the enemy gets

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Then Jesus said to the chief priests and officers of the temple and elders, who had come out against him, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

Luke 22:52-53 (ESV)

“ . . . this is your hour, and the power of darkness . . . “

The authority of Jesus is amazing. I don’t believe that anything that happened on that dreadful night was beyond His control. “This is your hour” — Almighty God gave the enemy that short time to do with His Son what he would. And what the enemy did was absolutely dreadful, but it was also all within God’s plan.

I’ve often wondered what the angels thought during the passion of Jesus. Were they aware of why it was happening? I don’t know much about angels, but scripture gives us hints about their power and, as C.S. Lewis remarked in his excellent space trilogy (I paraphrase, from memory) the ones assigned to earth are of a “decidedly military caste”. The image I hold in my imagination is of the angels looking on from the heavens in horror as their Lord is tortured and killed. Their white-knuckled hands grip golden sword-hilts as they await the order that never comes. With tears of fury running down their cheeks they tremble and strain to hear the shouted order to “Attack!!!!” Surely toward the end many of them desired to rain holy fire and destruction on the entire earth — how could a race of beings who dared touch the Beloved with such violence be allowed to survive? Why didn’t their Lord call for them to rescue Him as He suffered on the cross?

This is all conjecture, of course. I am not really sure what the angels thought and felt. But what I am sure of is that God in His sovereignty gave the enemy that “hour”. It was the time when the power of darkness had its way, with God’s permission.

The blessed good news is that an hour is all the enemy ever gets. The raft of evil stays afloat for just a moment in the wide ocean of eternity. And even the workings of the enemy get turned against him, as he discovers, time and again, that the evil he worked has been woven into the good purposes of God. As Joseph said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.” (Genesis 45:4b-5). Evil can’t change God’s plans. It just can’t.

So, in my best moments, I don’t fret about the future, and I don’t worry about the enemy winning. What he has meant for evil, God will turn to good. The enemy’s hour of darkness will be swallowed up in the bright Morning of God’s victory. Even in the dark hours I can feel the healing touch of God, the warmth coming back into my weary limbs, the stiffening of faith and resolve, and the strength returning to my arms. I can once more pick up my sword and do battle.

Thank you Lord, for the hope that sustains!

“Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.”

– Psalm 30:5 (ESV)

“I have sworn by my holiness . . .”

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He shall cry to me, ‘You are my Father,
my God, and the Rock of my salvation.’
And I will make him the firstborn,
the highest of the kings of the earth.
My steadfast love I will keep for him forever,
and my covenant will stand firm for him.
I will establish his offspring forever
and his throne as the days of the heavens.
If his children forsake my law
and do not walk according to my rules,
if they violate my statutes
and do not keep my commandments,
then I will punish their transgression with the rod
and their iniquity with stripes,
but I will not remove from him my steadfast love
or be false to my faithfulness.
I will not violate my covenant
or alter the word that went forth from my lips.
Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;
I will not lie to David.
His offspring shall endure forever,
his throne as long as the sun before me.
Like the moon it shall be established forever,
a faithful witness in the skies.”

Selah

– Psalm 89:26-37 (ESV)

In the middle of Psalm 89 the psalmist launches into this beautiful and powerful retelling of the promises of God to His servant David. I am no Biblical scholar, but I see in this as well God’s promise extended to His Son – “I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” – and to those of us, redeemed by Christ, who have become children of God.

When God speaks of His promises, certain words and phrases begin to establish themselves in the prose like ancient and steadfast obelisks of truth: “my covenant will stand firm”, “I will establish . . . forever”, “I will not remove”, “steadfast love”, “endure forever”.

“Once for all I have sworn by my holiness”

God means what He says. He swears to it by His holiness (what greater thing could He swear by?). I praise Him for that iron determination of His, established in beautiful, beautiful truth, and for the sovereignty and Lordship that God exerts over His creation. There have been times in my life when the thought that God really is in control seemed an unfair thing. I can’t fathom now what I was thinking – what a comfort it is to know that He simply will not lose, He will not let His promise return void.

God does what it takes. He lovingly disciplines us, He brings us back home. He will not let us go, will not lie to us, and will never be faithless – least of all to Himself.

“Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;
I will not lie to David.
His offspring shall endure forever,
his throne as long as the sun before me.
Like the moon it shall be established forever,
a faithful witness in the skies.”

These are words we can count on. He has sworn to them by His holiness.

He groans for us

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Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

– Romans 8:26 (ESV)

Last night I went to bed groaning. Almost audibly. Have you ever had no idea what you were going to do? What to pray for? Thankfully, since Christ came into my life those times have been rare. But I’m in one of those times now. The feeling is the same that any man gets when “action” seems called for but he doesn’t know which “action” to take. Go left? Go right? Forward? Back? Or maybe just stand here and spin around in circles.

It is such a weak feeling.

It is comforting to know that when I groan I am not alone. And that when I am weak my Intercessor stands beside me, and He lifts up my head and holds up my arms. He helps us in our weakness, and when we’ve exhausted all of our ideas, schemes, and stratagems, when our prayer has been reduced to a groan and, finally, to silence, He groans for us.

How can we not love God? His compassions, they fail not. He stands by the tomb of our hope and weeps with us, and then commands it to come forth! He stands by the orphan and the dispossessed, and makes of the outcast a great nation. He binds up our wounds, heals our broken hearts, dries our tears, and, when all understanding says “despair”, He gives us a peace that passes all understanding.

And I feel like I just barely know Him — how can I comprehend this great King of the universe? He is lifted high in glory, the Mighty One. He is the self-existing, eternal “I AM” of all the ages. Yet I do know Him, because He has made Himself known to me, has poured Himself out for us all, has given us His last full measure.

And when I’m hurting, He stands beside me, wraps His arms around me, and groans.

The God of the second chance

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The excellent Mr. Standfast today has posted a simple reminder for us: The God of the second chance. He includes no commentary, just two passages of scripture:

Acts 15:38-40 (circa 50 AD)

Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company.

2 Timothy 4:9-11a (circa 65 AD)

Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry.

Don’t you just love these juxtaposed passages? There is much to observe and to be read between the lines; the loyal love of Barnabas, the growth in Kingdom usefulness of John-Mark over those fifteen years, and – did you catch it? – the development of a gentle humility in the aged Paul. And even a tender hint of loneliness in the old apostle. “Only Luke is with me.” – ahhh. Luke. Good man.

God never gave up on Mark. Neither did Barnabas. And in the end, neither did Paul.

May God build into me the encouragement and steadfast love of Barnabas, the boldness and single-minded drive of Paul, and the growing usefulness of John Mark. Not to mention the ability to just “be there” exhibited in faithful Luke. These are jewels in the crown of character that I desire greatly.

And may I learn to extend the same grace and second, third, and four-hundredth chances to others that God has extended to me.

“On Your chariot of salvation . . .”

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Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord?
Was your anger against the rivers,
or your indignation against the sea,
when you rode on your horses,
on your chariot of salvation?
You stripped the sheath from your bow,
calling for many arrows.

Selah

– Habakkuk 3:8-9a (ESV)

Habakkuk 3 is a breathtaking chapter. It’s a poem, really; a cry for deliverance and a promise of patience.

Habakkuk lived and prophesied at a time of crisis. We often use the word “crisis” to describe the temporal hardships and heartaches in our own lives, but what the people of Israel faced in Habakkuk’s time was nothing short of national extinction. The Babylonians were coming.

“For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize dwellings not their own.” – Habakkuk 1:6

The state of Habakkuk’s troubled mind, I would imagine, was something akin to the way a young soldier in World War I would have felt as he crouched in terror and watched, powerless, as his enemy overran his trench, killing his friends and eventually killing him. Habakkuk was waiting, in great fear, for the arrival of the juggernaut.

Yet Habakkuk, the questioning prophet, the one who pled his case before God, knew who his Deliverer was. His God was the one who had delivered His people before, the God who uncovers his bow and calls for many arrows, who mounts His chariot of salvation and rides to the rescue. Habakkuk’s prayer was that God would deliver again, and he boasts of the power of his God:

The sun and moon stood still in their place
at the light of your arrows as they sped,
at the flash of your glittering spear.
You marched through the earth in fury;
you threshed the nations in anger.
You went out for the salvation of your people,
for the salvation of your anointed.

– Habakkuk 3:11-13a (ESV)

So far so good; I am staying with the prophet up to this point. Yes, Lord, come save!

But then Habakkuk does something unexpected; something that leaves me in his dust. Habakkuk silently, at the end of a thought, weighs the justice and goodness of God against the wickedness of his nation, and the calls for quick deliverance die on his lips. There is no quick fix for the predicament that his nation has brought upon itself.

Yet in this dreadful knowledge Habakkuk rejoices! It is the realistic rejoicing of a man who knows that disaster is about to strike but who has chosen to wait patiently for His Lord anyway, knowing that the calamities wrought by God are far better than the pleasures of the world apart from Him.

I hear, and my body trembles;
my lips quiver at the sound;
rottenness enters into my bones;
my legs tremble beneath me.
Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble
to come upon people who invade us.
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.

– Habakkuk 3:16-19 (ESV)

Thus the prophet who began his oracle asking God “How long until You deliver us?”, “Why won’t you help?”, comes to the end of all his complaints and questions, and rests in the patience and strength of his Lord. And in that strength he ascends to a high place of relationship with God that few of us ever attain.

And there he waits for the Lord to come riding on His chariot of salvation! The timing may not be to Habakkuk’s liking, but it is the timing and wisdom of God that he now desires.

And that is joy!

Here is love

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Today’s Bible Gateway verse of the day describes an aspect of God’s love that I wish I was eloquent enough to adequately write about. Drink this in:

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

– Romans 5:6-8 (NIV)

“Very rarely will anyone die . . .” – so true. Martyrdom is a rare thing. I’ve often wondered how I will react if ever given the chance to lay my life down for another. My great fear is that I will not act as Christ did, but will rather desire my own life above all others. I hope not! As Paul points out, very rarely will anyone die, even for someone who deserves to be saved.

What then can we make of God’s sacrifice for us? I’m afraid that I can’t fathom it. At all! As I confessed in the paragraph above, I wonder how I will react if ever given the chance to die for another. I think about this quite a bit, actually. But there is another thought that is so frightful that I never venture toward it. It is the thought of sacrificing one of my children. I simply can’t imagine a situation where I could do that. It is the one area of death and pain where the choice is pretty much a no-brainer. I don’t believe I could do that. Ever.

Which is why I stand in awe of our Lord. He demonstrated His own love for us in this fact: while we were still sinners and powerless to help ourselves, He sent His own Son to die for us. And yet even that statement, as true as it is, doesn’t capture the full horror of the event or the extremities of sacrifice to which our Lord was willing to go for you and me. Christ didn’t just die for us, He was killed by us.

Here is love. Amazing, self-sacrificing, forgiving, gracious love. Paul continues:

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

– Romans 5:9-11

“How much more” indeed! We have a God who loves us in a way that we’ve rarely seen demonstrated. In fact, this kind of love is not just rare, it’s almost unheard of! We weren’t just helpless; we were His active enemies at the point of rescue. An analogy that comes to mind is that of a fireman rushing into a burning building to save a victim, only to find that victim actively engaged in arsoning the building with a flamethrower. And, not content to bring about his own destruction, the victim then turns the flamethrower on his rescuer. Yes, we were Jesus’ enemies, and we played our part with deadly efficiency.

When we were still His enemies, we were reconciled. Reconciliation is such a beautiful word. And it is a beautiful thing to see. In that word we get a picture of whispered reassurances of forgiveness and love, tears of joy, arms opened wide to receive the prodigal back home, peace, a life begun anew. We are born desperately needing to be reconciled with our Creator, and desperately powerless to do anything about it. Reconciliation is only something that God can do.

And it’s what our God has done.

Here is love!