Thought for Today
Matthew 5:45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Matthew 11:29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
These Thoughts I share are not some sort of agenda-driven dialogue. I don’t have a book of accumulated topics to cover. This is almost a stream-of-consciousness sharing each day. Inevitably, I will cover some issues repeatedly. I’m sure my ‘rant’ this morning will sound familiar.
I have had ‘one of those weeks!’ The specifics are not significant. Suffice it to say that our 10+-year-old home is no longer new. Things are beginning to wear out and/or break. My ‘repair it or fix it’ list has more than 1 item on it. Ironically (?), it always seems that the items on my list are all items I do not want to fix, don’t know how to fix, or I hate to fix. Hard as it may be to imagine, all of this has been known to make me a bit of a grump.
Just to add to my grumpiness, we have had several beautiful days in a row. Our weather has made a u-turn today, but yesterday and the previous day were a bit warmer than usual, the skies were clear and the birds were singing. I wanted to play in the garden, not fix things indoors.
Anger, irritability and general grumpiness are not nice emotions. But, they are very human emotions. How are we as Christians to deal with those times when things are not going the way we wish them to be? And, yes, even Christian ministers have those times. How does our faith interface with trivia like broken appliances and house fixtures? Pray as we will, prayer will not fix a leaky faucet. Prayer will not repair a broken window shade. Prayer will not make an electric dryer dry the clothes.
Some of the lessons I find in scripture are not what I want to hear. “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” seems counterintuitive to my ears. Shouldn’t the evil and unrighteous be punished by darkness and drought for being who and what they are? Throughout history, God’s children have sought to correlate wealth, prosperity and beneficence with faith and righteousness. We can even find verses which, taken out of context, support that idea.
It is very tempting to apply the metrics of our material world to the conditions of eternity. Certainly when I worked as an engineer, my employers would reward me financially based on the quality of my work. Salary and position were performance based (although it never hurt to have someone higher up looking out for you). The material quality of our life and our lifestyle were directly proportional to how hard and how smart I performed my job.
But John reminds us that God sent Jesus “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Paul reminds us that we are saved by the grace of God simply because of our faith in Jesus. My favorite theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote “Costly grace is the grace of God that demands a full response of discipleship, sacrifice, and obedience in contrast to cheap grace, which offers forgiveness without transformation.” (Copilot search)
What does any of that have to do with house repairs and my general grumpiness? It reminds me that those repairs and their impact on my mood are temporary, transient things in our material world and life. It awakens that small voice in the back of my mind that tells me to look around me, to listen to the sounds of the bombs that are not falling on my home or my neighbors’. It reminds me that yesterday, when I went to the grocery, it was still standing, there were products on the shelves and I even had choices. It reminds me that Sunday I can freely go to the church I serve and preach the message God inspires me to preach without any intervention.
Whether I understand that small voice as my conscience, my id, or the Holy Spirit, that small voice reminds me of the metrics of eternity and of my faith in the Creator of Creation and his Son, Jesus.
Stay safe, remain grounded in the metrics of eternity, trust God,
Pastor Ray