music :: worship :: life
Throughout the Lenten season, I’ve been using John 15:13 to introduce our Lent theme song, Above All—
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
I have focused on the magnitude of his love—the awesome amazing love. And I have focused on the magnitude of the sacrifice. Just to give up the bliss of eternity, the perfection of paradise to descend into this darkness, this fallen world—is that not sacrifice enough? But to suffer the agony, the ignominy of the cross! What kind of love is this? What kind of sacrifice?
But somehow when I said the words again on Easter Morning, the final word leapt into focus: the word friends. He said, “lay down his life for his friends.�?
The arithmetic of the crucifixion fools us. Jesus died thousands of years ago, thousands of miles away. He died to save all humankind—all the teeming billions of souls strewn across the globe and stretching down the centuries and millennia, for all time. The math defeats us. We are single blades of grass lost in a prairie as seen from outer space. And Jesus—that far away, long ago Christ—who are we to him? Yet here he plainly says he died for his friends. That’s us—you and me. He calls us his friends!
On a clear day, have you ever stepped outside and looked up into the air and seen that vast expanse of blue, and it looks so far away? But this is mere illusion. For in reality it’s right here, all around us. We breathe it in without knowing, every moment of our lives.
The same is true of Christ. Let’s not be fooled by the math. He is no long ago, far away, guy in the sky. He is closer to us than the very air we breathe.
For in him we live and move and have our being.
—Acts 17:28
He is right here. Right now. Always. Forever.
From our first cry to our final breath, Christ is with us.
We are his friends, and he will never, ever leave us alone.
Only You fill me.
The things of earth leave me
thirsty.
Though I drown—
drench myself in the waters
of the world—
Though I stuff myself with
earthly fare—
I hunger still
wanting more
Only You can satisfy
Only You fulfill my desire.
Ordinarily I don’t write down these kinds of things, but this was a God-thing too blatant to miss. Usually God does his work behind the scenes in ways that are subtle and often go unnoticed, or can easily be explained away. About a year-and-a-half ago, I made a purchase on one of those “no payments, no interest for 18 months� plans. I’ve done this before; you make payments as you go along and be sure you’re finished before the interest comes due. But this time, there was always some other need that took priority, and I kept putting the payments off.
Last Wednesday, as I was doing my finances, I noticed that my 128 months was over on March 25th. It had to be payed in full or I would have to pay the deferred interest (at 20.9%)! I didn’t have that much extra cash laying around so I transferred some money from savings and paid the bill in full. I’d rather lose the piddly bit of interest from the savings than pay the 20%.
Sunday, as I was going through the unopened mail from earlier in the week, I opened a letter from my mortgage company. I was expecting it to be next month’s bill. Instead, it was a review of my escrow account. It seems that in the past year, I had overpaid my taxes, and rather than lower my payment to let the account catch up, they sent me a check to refund the surplus.
Can anyone guess how much the check was for? If you said the exact amount of the bill I just paid, you would be wrong. It was for $0.42 more. I think that just covers the cost of a stamp, a check, and an envelope.
That check, by the way, had arrived on Tuesday, the day before I made the payment. Had I opened it right away, I would have known God was looking out for me all along.
God has chased us all the way from Eden. We’ve come a long way from Eden, running all the way. He never tires, never flags, never wavers in his pursuit of us: relentless, unbent, undeterred. Still we run. Eventually he catches us. We were well hid, or so we thought. But suddenly he was there! Right there! Where we least expected him. And we shout: We are found!
But soon we run again, and again he chases. Always. All our lives. What is it we fear? His love is overpowering. His love is fierce. When he catches us, it changes everything. Look at Paul. God pounced on Paul like a mountain lion on a kid, and tore him up. Paul never recovered. An authentic encounter with the living God will ruin your life. We run scared.
His love could burn us up from the inside out. His love is hot. His love is sticky. We can’t get free of it. No matter how we try.
We don’t want to be caught by God. It changes us. If God tags us, we’re “it.” And then what will we have to do? What does he want from us? Where will he send us? What will become of our comfortable lives?
How it hurts! — How it tingles! — When our foot’s been asleep and the blood starts flowing again. And how, when God enters our lives, pounces upon us from behind some rock beside the road we travel, how it hurts! When feeling starts coming back to our lives, where we’ve been shambling, numb, asleep. When the grace starts circulating again through our unfeeling hearts and minds and sets us tingling. Hot, burning, we jump and shout. We cry out: I’m alive, I’m alive! God has found me and I’m alive!
When I was little, we had a game in our backyard called a tether-ball. Everybody had one. It was like a volleyball tied to a rope, suspended from a pole about 8 or 10 feet high. To play, you would slap the ball in one direction. The ball would circle around the pole, and your opponent would try to slap it back the other way. The object was to get the ball completely wrapped around the pole in your direction.
A lot of people approach God with a misconception: they think that once they become Christians, they will have God on their side, and the world won’t get slap them around any more. Much to their dismay, the world keeps slapping them around as much as it ever did. So what good is it to be Christian? —To have God on your side?
The difference between the Christian and the non-Christian is not whether the world slaps you around, but in what happens when the world slaps you around. It’s the difference between being a volleyball and a tether-ball.
When you accept Christ, he becomes your center-pole. The Grace of God tethers you to him with a strong cord. And as long as you cling to his Word, nothing can separate you from Christ.
When you slap a volleyball, it can wind up anywhere. But when you slap a tether-ball, it can only come right back toward the center-pole. As a Christian, no matter how hard the world slaps you, it only flings you back toward Christ. The more it slaps you, the more it wraps you tighter and tighter in his embrace.
You always hear the saying, “The optimist sees the glass as half full, and the pessimist sees the glass as half empty. Which one are you?”
My answer is, “Neither.” Both answers are correct. The glass is half empty and half full. There may even be several other correct answers. If you settle for the first right answer, you’ve seriously short-changed yourself. Always look for the next right answer. Then you have choices. You can pick the one that best suits the circumstances.
To promote the notion that it is best to see the glass as half full is foolish and irresponsible. It leads to the absurd attitude that things are getting better and better. But things are not going to get better unless you have identified the needs and are prepared to address them. The glass is not going to fill itself. Unless you have recognized that the glass is half empty and are prepared to remedy the problem, it will never be filled.
Furthermore, not only may there be more than one right answer, there may be more than one desirable goal. Do you want the glass to be full, or do you want the glass to be empty? Or do you want the glass to be partly full and partly empty? All of these may be desirable objectives for different people or in different circumstances.
And if you’ve been mowing the lawn on a hot day, will you be happier with a full glass of ice cold lemonade, or an empty glass of ice cold lemonade? If you have a full glass, you are still thirsty. If what you desire is relief from your thirst, then what you want is an empty glass. You want that lemonade inside you.
This is a common problem in American culture. People seem to be obsessed with having the full glass. What if we lived our lives in search of the empty glass? Think of the old Zen parable “If you want me to fill your cup, you must first empty it.” Why don’t we drink every glass that comes to us. Drink it to the full. Drain it dry.
How do we approach God. Do we come to Him with our glasses full, our glasses empty?
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