rest easy

We live between two great days: The day Christ hung before men and the day all men will kneel before Christ.

Faith is patience while you sow. It’s deciding every day to hold on to God’s promises despite what reality is showing you. Choose faith even when it has to begin all over again each day.

The very thing we are afraid of, our brokenness, is the door to our Father’s heart.

In classic Greek and Roman mythology, it was always the strongest and smartest who reached God and the divine. Bellephron and Achilles and Odysseus and Perseus: they were rippling with muscles or huge brains or special powers.But Scripture, in a complete reversal of human values and stereotypical strength, shows that God pursues maybe the weakest individual in the entire town of that day: Mary Magdalene, a mentally unstable woman. The one who others were writing off as a nobody, an outsider, an outcast.If this story were told in another Epic Myth – The two-ton stone would still be rolled over the grave, and God would say: “Move the stone and you will have access to me. Show me your strength.” And maybe a special “Chosen One” could roll the stone from the grave.Yet Mary Magdalene shows up and the stone is already removed. Which means, in a literal and metaphorical sense, that grace rolled the stone away. God had already done the work to reach His people, to reach the weakest person.We don’t need to move the stone to find God, but God moved the stone to find us. This is the Essential Heart of God and the Gospel.

Denis Johnson’s three rules to write by:

If you’re suffering right now, you don’t have to pretend it’s all good. You don’t have to add, “But praise God.” When Jesus was hours from crucifixion, he didn’t sing in the garden or act hyper-spiritual. He was sweating blood. He asked the Father for a way out. But Jesus ultimately went to that cross with joy: not a shallow consolation that knows no pain, but a joy deepened by sorrow and recognizing the hurt of humanity. God is always trying to make you more human and not less. You can cry out in agony. In that honesty, God is establishing great character in you. Such a Christian is both happier and sadder at the same time, because they long for a better home and already have one.

The gospel tells me that there is not only hope in my trials, but purpose to them- This is because the gospel teaches me that God’s great goal is not superficial, circumstantial happiness, but joyful holiness. So I can trust that He is using my trials and struggles to change and transform me, to grow my faith, and sanctify my heart. Trials are not the absence of His love, but a great display of His love. And because the gospel reminds me of this devastating love of God, I know that it is impossible for him to allow anything in my life that is not an aspect of His love. So I can pray for God to do the miraculous, but be absolutely at ease if he doesn’t, because I trust that His plan for my life is brought in love. Only the gospel allows me to go through difficulties and still be a rest in my soul.