Faith and Evangelism; April 19, 2020

Posted on April 21, 2020 by jgarrott

Philemon 1:6 I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ.

I’ve liked this particular statement for a long time. There is naturally some leeway in translation, as is often the case, but any way you translate it, it gives insight on the relationship between what we believe and what we do. The Japanese renders this as, “May the fellowship of your faith be living and active by your knowing all the good things that are done among us because of Christ.” That sounds rather different from the NIV here (which I happen to like very much) but the point remains that faith and knowledge and human interaction and good things in Christ are all intertwined. It is a fact of human psychology that men are pretty good at compartmentalizing life. Women, on the other hand, are more inclined to see everything as a single entity. Either approach can have advantages at times, but also disadvantages. Men can be better at keeping going even when one particular part of their life is less than optimal, and women can be better at recognizing interconnections. Looking at it negatively, men are better at hypocrisy! In the specific area of our faith, a man might understand that they can communicate Christ even though they aren’t a perfect Christian, but a woman might understand that the most effective evangelism is the overflow of our own joy in the Lord. Both things are true! Most “systems of evangelism” are cooked up by men, but Peter says that a woman can win her husband to Christ without saying a word! (1 Peter 3:1-2) The important thing to remember is that the more we genuinely know of Christ, the more we will want to share that knowledge with others, and in the process, share Christ Himself. And in the process of sharing, we discover more and more of Christ, as the NIV expresses it. I realized many years ago that one of the best ways to grow in faith is to share the faith you have. That might seem counter-intuitive, but I’ve seen it happen again and again. Actually, from a secular standpoint, it has long been recognized that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. That just happens to be true with spiritual things as well.

This is extremely relevant to what I hope will happen in today’s service and business meeting. I want the believers to understand that we exist for the purpose of bringing others into eternal life by grace through faith, and this verse is intimately connected with that. I need to express God’s truth clearly through the message, and then as we have the time of “brainstorming” in the business meeting about our plans for this fiscal year, I want the believers to have revelations of God’s will for them as they put into words what they already know. When we speak truth, we are speaking it to ourselves as well as to those around us. That’s a major reason faith declarations can be very effective in growing and strengthening us. I need to be completely open to whatever God wants to do today, and keep myself fully available to Him.

Father, thank You for this powerful Word. Help me follow through! May Your will be done in every detail, building up the Body of Christ for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!

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Salvation; April 18, 2020

Posted on April 21, 2020 by jgarrott

Titus 3:4-7 But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.

Here Paul condenses the whole plan and purpose of salvation, and it is magnificent indeed. In the very next verse he talks about why it’s important that every believer thoroughly understand this. It sometimes amazes me what people seem to think salvation is. Far too many are interested almost entirely in relief from their immediate problems or situation, when God’s perspective is from eternity. We certainly can’t switch instantly to an eternal perspective – I don’t think that happens even at the moment of death – but we do need to examine our goals and see where we are headed. Several years ago The Imperials recorded a song, First Day in Heaven, that deals with the realization that will come over us once we are out of the confines of this life. One thing that is central to it all is that, as Paul says here, salvation isn’t something we can earn, but it is an overflow of God’s kindness, love, and mercy. The only appropriate response is an overwhelming gratitude. People who don’t know they were lost and headed for hell aren’t going to be grateful, and people who think they somehow earned salvation aren’t going to be grateful. Both of those groups have been blinded and deceived by the devil. We need to lay hold of the simple, fundamental truths expressed here and marvel at the incredible grace of God. We sing, Amazing Grace, rather glibly, not understanding that apart from God’s grace we are as fit for hell as the captain of a slave ship.

This of course applies to me, just as it does to every human being. For far too many years I thought I deserved salvation, and God had to come down on me pretty hard to shake me from that deception. Right now I am dedicated to communicating the Good News of salvation to as many as will receive it, but I must never think that such activity in itself earns me salvation; it is simply a response to my having been saved. I desire this same awareness for every believer, in this church and in every other church. Tomorrow I will be preaching on our motivation for meeting as a church, and in the business meeting to follow I plan to have a time of thinking and praying about how we are to fulfill our commission as Christ’s witnesses. We allow all sorts of excuses to keep us from sharing Christ with those around us, and I want us to open our eyes to recognize those excuses for what they are and reject them, boldly speaking the truth in love so that many, many more may be brought from darkness to light, from death into eternal life, for the pleasure and glory of God.

Father, thank You for this. The possibilities for tomorrow seem unlimited and incredible, but I certainly can’t make any of it happen on my own. I ask You to anoint and fill me, anoint and fill each and all of us, so that we may be brought out of “business as usual” into the fullness of Your plans for us, for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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God’s Grace; April 17, 2020

Posted on April 18, 2020 by jgarrott

Titus 2:11-13 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope–the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

After writing about specific instructions for specific groups of people, Paul here goes into what applies to them all, and to us all. He is careful to say that God’s grace teaches us to live like he describes here. We are all adept at pointing fingers at other people, saying how they should or shouldn’t live, but failing to examine our own lives in the light of God’s grace. God’s grace indeed teaches us to live like this describes, but the question is whether we receive and act on the lesson. There are negatives here, discarding the world’s attitudes and actions, and positives, receiving the lifestyle that God has planned and prepared for us. All of that can be very high stress, so Paul is careful to point out what makes it all worth it: the return of Christ in glory. Many people today discount that, since it’s been about 2000 years since Jesus ascended into the clouds, but for no one alive today is their appointment with God more than 100 years in the future. On the eternal scale, that’s just the blink of an eye! Peter famously wrote about that. “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:8-9) When the “daily slog” seems to be too much, we need to remember what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (2 Corinthians 4:17) In the end, it will all be more than worth it!

Naturally, this applies to me. I’ll confess that various stresses can get to me. We have a business meeting coming up the day after tomorrow, and not only do I not have all the materials ready for that, I don’t have the notes for the morning message! On top of that, there is all the “background noise” of the pandemic, and things involved with my school teaching, and on and on. I need to remember God’s grace in Christ Jesus, and allow that grace to wash over and fill me, washing out all the tensions that I allow to build up. In no area of my life am I adequate by myself, in my own strength and wisdom, but God is more than able to do anything at all, even using me. Anxiety is never His plan for me! He is my Provider, not the government or even my own effort. I am not to be passive, but rather active in my obedience, and if my focus is on God’s kingdom and His righteousness, I’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. (Matthew 6:33)

Father, You know what’s going on around me, and You know what’s going on in me. Help me indeed rest, relax, and rejoice in the assurance that You’ve got it all in control. May I do today what You have for me to do, when and how You want me to do it, so that my obedience may draw me into closer fellowship with you, as well as accomplish Your will on Your schedule for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!

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Purity; April 16, 2020

Posted on April 18, 2020 by jgarrott

Titus 1:15-16 To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him.

People are tricky. Sometimes those who are most legalistic about the behavior of others are debauched in their personal lives. There have been examples of that throughout history. As a matter of fact, right now we see politicians of various labels thinking they are exceptions to the very rules they insist on for everyone else. They of course aren’t Church leaders, but the principle is the same. As the song, Build an Ark says, “Tired of the men who make the laws and break them any time they please.” The thing is, we all have the same tendency, accusing in others what we excuse in ourselves. We all need the cleansing blood of Jesus over our minds and our actions. That’s why Jesus warned us about false teachers, saying that we would recognize them by their fruit. (Matthew 7:15-20) The sad thing is, when our mind and conscience is corrupted, we literally can’t see what is wrong with what we are doing. That’s why our focus must be on Jesus Christ first and foremost, because He alone is the standard by which we are to judge ourselves, the example to which we are to aspire.

Once again, this applies to me as much as it does to anyone else. I am to apply everything the Lord says to me and through me to myself first, before I go looking around to see who it might apply to. Simply knowing the truth in my mind doesn’t cut it; I need to be living it out. My purity must come from the inside out, as the natural fruit of humble fellowship with Christ by His Spirit. I am not to hesitate to correct those in my care when it is called for, but that must always be done in love, recognizing that my own life has needed plenty of correction over the years. At the same time, I’m not to excuse things simply because I’ve done them too. I’m back to what I wrote about yesterday: the need to love God and love my neighbor. If I love God in all humility and gratitude, He will cleanse me of every impurity. If I love my neighbor, I will accurately transmit God’s truth and love to him in the same way that I know I need them.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Thank You for the grace that You have poured out on me over the years, and that You continue to supply. May I be an undefiled instrument of that grace, lifting up those around me and not tearing them down, for their blessing and Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!

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Motivation; April 15, 2020

Posted on April 17, 2020 by jgarrott

John 20:31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John, writing several years after the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke had been circulating, wanted to fill in some of the blanks left by those accounts, as it says in verse 30, but his motivation is expressed here. And what a motivation it is! It should be one of the primary motivations of every believer. As self-centered as we are, we tend to be satisfied with our own salvation, forgetting that God loves the person next to us just as much as He does us. Love, by definition, wants to fulfill the desires of the one loved, so if we really love God, we should be working to introduce as many people as possible to Him, so that they too may believe and become His children. That we so generally fail to do that betrays the shallowness of our love for God. Here John is talking about what he has written, but this applies to far more than writing. The words we speak and the actions we take should be empowered by this same motivation. It all comes back to the two commandments Jesus specified: loving God and loving our neighbor. (Matthew 22:36-40) If we love God we will want Him to be happy, and since we want eternal life for ourselves, if we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, we will do all we can to bring him to eternal life. We really don’t think those two commandments through most of the time. I have said for many years that if every believer really knew who and what they were in Christ, the world would be transformed, and I remain convinced of that. We have so little grasp of what it really is to be a child of God! Right now with COVID-19 the whole world is being given an opportunity to reexamine their daily lives. Everyone is eager to “return to normal,” but what “normal” do we return to? If all of this causes any significant fraction of even the Christians (who are a fraction of the total) to return to Biblical principles for daily living, then the world will be a far better place for having gone through all of this.

This of course applies to me as much as it does to anyone. I have already dedicated my life to sharing the Gospel as a pastor, but my efficiency certainly hasn’t been very high. I need to allow the Holy Spirit to fine-tune my words and my actions to make them more effective. I have long said that I wanted to plan like I would live to at least 100, but live so that it would be fine to leave today. Likewise, my hesitation in asking the Lord to come back soon is that there are so many around me who are far from ready for that, and I want to take them with me before the Lord. I identify fully with what Paul said in Philippians 1:21-24. God has really been working on my motivations, and for that I am deeply grateful.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Show me what to do about it! It’s very appropriate as we have our annual business meeting Sunday that we would be thinking about why we are here. I pray that You would guide me in expressing this challenge to the believers, so that together we may seek Your will for how we are to communicate the Good News of the Kingdom in this new fiscal year. We tend to get sidetracked by financial considerations in one way or another. Help us seek Your will first, knowing that where You guide, You provide. We have a pretty spotty track record in that area to this point! May we rejoice to be Your children but not be satisfied with just us being Your children, so that many more may be drawn into Your family, Your life, for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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Understanding the Bible; April 14, 2020

Posted on April 17, 2020 by jgarrott

Luke 24:45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.

What a blessed thing! And how necessary! If we are honest, we too have to confess that sometimes the Bible seems like a blank wall, communicating nothing to us. However, when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes, we discover that the “blank wall” was really the inside of our spiritual eyelids! That’s why every time we read the Bible we should ask the Holy Spirit to be our guide, to speak into our hearts what the Father is saying to us. If we will do that, we will find that He is amazingly faithful to do exactly that. There is no embarrassment whatsoever in that. After all, those to whom Jesus was speaking here had been with Him personally for over three years, and yet they still needed to have their eyes opened. It’s like Paul said: “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:14) Without the Holy Spirit, the Bible can easily become the foundation of a legalistic, man-centered system, and that is tragic. We need always to read the Bible with the “running commentary” of the Author. (2 Timothy 3:16)

I had taken in occasional sips of the Holy Spirit from childhood, raised in the home that I was, but it wasn’t until I received the baptism in the Holy Spirit by faith that the Bible really came alive to me. I had had a clear example right under my nose for a few years prior to that, because Cathy was baptized in the Holy Spirit shortly before we left Hawaii when I got out of the army in 1972. After she had that experience, she couldn’t get her nose out of the Bible! Her foreign language in college was Biblical Greek, and every day while I was at work she would be digging into the Word, rejoicing to see it unfolding before her. Thinking about it, it wasn’t until after I was baptized in the Spirit in 1974 that daily devotions became an ingrained habit that is the foundation of my life. I had the groundwork of Biblical knowledge already, but it took the direct help of the Holy Spirit to enable me to understand what I “knew.” In the years since then I have found that often I will say things that seem completely obvious to me, since the Bible expresses them clearly and repeatedly, and those listening to me will say, “That’s so deep!” I should be used to it by now, but I’m still surprised by that at times. One of the joys of reading the Bible under the Spirit’s guidance is that often I will read a passage that is completely familiar and find that God is speaking to me now, through those very familiar words. That’s having the eyes of my heart opened, and I am deeply grateful.

Father, You know how much I want this life in the Spirit for each of those in my care, but I know You want it even more. Help me not try to make it happen by my strength – which is no strength – but allow You to use even me to bring it about. May we all be so filled with Your Spirit that Your Word comes alive to us and we hear You clearly, to be and do all that You desire, for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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Faith; April 13, 2020

Posted on April 16, 2020 by jgarrott

Luke 24:25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!”

This doesn’t seem very politically correct to us, but it was spoken in love. That’s a good thing, because it applies to us, too! A major problem with mankind down through the ages has been the failure to believe what God has told us. We make up countless excuses for not believing, and the devil is happy to supply us with even more. About 50 years ago an expression was popular in Christian circles: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” The problem is, it would be more accurate to say, “God said it, that settles it.” Our participating in God’s blessings generally depends on faith, from salvation right on down the line, but God rules the universe whether we believe it or not. Some people seem to think they are hurting God by refusing to believe in Him, but they really are only hurting themselves. They seem to think that by denying the existence of a Creator, they free themselves from all of His rules, not recognizing that those rules are “baked into” the universe, so to speak. The tragedy is that every one of God’s rules is for our good, to keep us from harm and guide us into the abundance that He has prepared for us. The vast majority of the suffering in the world stems from people ignoring or deliberately flouting God’s rules. The thing is, God has gone beyond just rules, to tell us things that are going to happen. That is what Jesus was referring to here. From our perspective, the prophecies about the Messiah seem very clear, and the odds against any one person fulfilling them all in such detail are so beyond astronomical that it seems absurd not to believe in Jesus. However, many devout Jews even today take that position, because their preconceptions have blinded them. Even so, many Christians choose to believe fantasies people have extrapolated from the Bible, or even made up out of whole cloth, rather than believing God’s Word itself. We are indeed foolish and slow of heart!

This of course applies to me, as it does to every thinking person on the planet. I had the incredible blessing of being raised in a home that was steeped in faith and Scripture, yet I don’t remember hearing about the presence, gifts, and power of the Holy Spirit until I was an adult, and indeed the father of two children. I wouldn’t insist that I was never told about them, but it never penetrated at any rate. The NIV says “slow of heart,” but the Japanese says “dull of heart.” My heart wouldn’t have cut warm butter! Every once in a while things would get through, and I do have clear memories of some encounters with God that I had as a child, but really only about three in the first 25 years of my life. That’s pretty dull and foolish! Given that track record, I should have patience with those around me, but I will confess to wanting to say exactly what Jesus said here at times! However, God is incredibly patient and gracious, and He continues to save people in spite of our dull, foolish hearts. I am not to focus on human failures, either my own or those of anyone else, but on my Lord in all His power and perfection, and on all He has spoken to us His children, choosing to obey even when I don’t understand, because so often, understanding is beyond me.

Father, thank You for this powerful reminder. Help me operate in the faith You provide, not trying to drum it up on my own but accepting and applying what You place in me. May I be an effective instrument for You to impart faith to others as well, so that many may be brought from death to life, for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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Our Place in Christ; April 12, 2020

Posted on April 16, 2020 by jgarrott

John 20:17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'”

The scene here is very easy to picture, with Jesus hardly able to stand because Mary has wrapped her arms so tightly around His ankles. We can identify with such intense emotion, even if we’ve never felt it directly ourselves. What Jesus says to Mary is very interesting, and I think I will understand it fully only when I am before His throne in heaven. He tells her not to cling to Him “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” To me, that says that after He has ascended, clinging to Him is OK! We can’t cling to Him physically any more than Mary could after the ascension, but spiritually we should never let Him go. We tend to “let go of Jesus” for all sorts of things: money, pleasure, prestige, what have you. However, every bit of that is a mistake, because all of that is temporal, passing, when Jesus is eternal. The other “blow your mind” thing Jesus said was “my Father and your Father, my God and your God.” Linguistically at least, Jesus was raising His disciples to His level. We really can’t wrap our minds around that, but it fits perfectly with something He had said in the upper room after His last supper, and something He said in the same location in the evening after His encounter with Mary. “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12) “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20:21) Paul wasn’t present on those occasions, but he expressed this truth as, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27) (Actually, Paul had a lot more to say about this, but it’s too much to quote here.) This also fits in with the logically impossible things Jesus said in His prayer just before He went to Gethsemane, about our being in Him as He is in the Father and the Father in us and all of that. (John 17) Perhaps the deepest joy of the life of faith is discovering by experience how all of this is indeed possible, even though human words can hardly explain it. We are not God, yet God raises us to His level in ways that we can hardly grasp, much less put into words. This is what being in Christ is all about.

Of course this applies to me, just as it does to every believer. It isn’t something we can grasp or achieve or even understand on our own, but God is incredibly gracious. My father wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Greek uses of “in Christ” and related expressions in the New Testament, but he told me personally, about two months before he left this earth, that he didn’t understand it until after he had a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit after he had arrived in Japan as a missionary. At the point he told me about it I was seeking the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but hadn’t experienced it because of my confusion about spiritual gifts. That was in 1974, and in the 46 years since then I have learned more and more of what it is all about. I wish I walked in it more completely, more consistently, but I know that it is already an accomplished fact and I look forward to its fulfillment. There is no room whatsoever for pride, but it does require my participation in submitting my will to Him, and that is what I strive to do, for His glory alone.

Father, this is beyond words to express. Thank You for Your totally amazing grace. Thank You for this glorious Resurrection Sunday. The weather is rainy, COVID-19 is rampant, and all sorts of other things seem less than optimal. But You are God and Christ is risen and I am in Christ, and that is all that really matters. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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Death; April 11, 2020

Posted on April 12, 2020 by jgarrott

John 19:30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

A great deal has been written and spoken about this verse, including by me, but the thing that strikes me most at the moment is the relief Jesus must have felt at being able to do this. We tend to cling to physical life as long as possible, and we desire and expect others to do so as well. One of the stages of grief is anger, often at the one who has died for not staying around longer. How selfish! Especially when someone is young, or relatively so, we tend to think, and say, “How much they have missed!” It doesn’t occur to us that, if they are in Christ, what they have gone to leaves everything they have “missed” in the dust! We have such a low view of eternity! Of all the people who have died, Jesus alone knew exactly what He was going to. That on top of the incredible suffering he had experienced in the hours leading up to this moment must have made this moment sweet indeed. I can hardly imagine the sense of accomplishment He must have had, because what He had finished (the Japanese says “completed”) was salvation for all mankind, available to all who would receive it in faith. We tend to equate death with failure and defeat, but sometimes, and certainly here, it is glorious victory. Right now we are all worked up over the many for whom COVID-19 has been the agent of their death, but we forget that everyone dies at some point – probably because we don’t want to face the reality that we will do so as well. It is not up to us to decide when that point is, for ourselves or for others. That is why suicide and euthanasia, not to mention murder, are wrong. Medicine, allowing long and productive lives on this earth, is hardly a bad thing, but it is ultimately stop-gap. What is far more important is where and how we spend eternity.

As a pastor I have been involved with death probably more than the average person. I have seen widows, particularly, quite angry at their recently deceased husbands for leaving them behind. And that has been the case even with some fairly strong Christians! For one of those, however, that anger very quickly dissipated, and she was deeply grateful when I conducted her husband’s funeral as a victory celebration. I think I was still fairly young when I realized that funerals are really for those left behind, far more than they are for the deceased. We desire and need a sense of closure, and funerals assist with that. I have been to Buddhist funerals for people whom I knew had committed themselves to Christ before they died, and I knew that the religious trappings made no difference at all to those people. My parents both died in the US while I was in Japan, but since their ashes are buried in Japan, I was able to attend their burials. They both died relatively young, my father at 64 and my mother at 72, but I have great assurance that they were both able to say with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7) They too could say, as Jesus did, “It is completed,” meaning their task on earth. It is my prayer that I will be able to do the same.

Father, thank You for this reminder of all that Easter means. We tend to focus on the resurrection, but there can be no resurrection without death. Thank You for removing the fear of death from me. Help me be increasingly effective in imparting that faith to others, so that we may walk together in the victory of the cross, for Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!

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Crucifixion; April 10, 2020

Posted on April 11, 2020 by jgarrott

Luke 23:33-34 When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

The act of crucifixion is so horrible that Luke could do no more than use the bare words, “they crucified him.” Mel Gibson did us a great favor by directing and producing the movie, The Passion. The raw brutality, the reality of what was done to Jesus is hard for us even to imagine. We can quibble over the exact location of the nails in His hands, since a nail in the center of the palm would rip out with the body weight of the person crucified, and archaeologists have found bones that had had a nail run through the ball of the heel from the side, rather than simply with the feet crossed, but such details don’t change the fundamental facts. Jesus was nailed to that cross for us, not for His own sins but for ours. As a matter of fact, in the movie, Mel Gibson himself is the one holding the spike as it is hammered in. Luke doesn’t make clear the timing of Jesus’ statement recorded here, whether it was as the nails were being hammered, as he lay there nailed to the cross, or after the cross was raised and His weight was supported by the nails driven through His flesh, but that again is immaterial. The point is that He said it, asking that we be forgiven for our sins that brought crucifixion upon Him. And the point about the soldiers rolling dice to decide who got His clothing drives home the point that for the soldiers this was just a job, and the clothing of the executed was part of their pay for doing it. Paintings and movies always have some sort of loin cloth, but the reality was that He likely wasn’t left even with that, because shame was a major part of the punishment. We really don’t grasp all that Jesus went through for us, or the magnitude of the love that made Him do it. When we realize that it was our own sin that did that to Him, we are transformed as we need to be, and as Paul said, we are crucified with Him, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in and through us. (Galatians 2:20)

Every time I perform a wedding I do a minor dramatization of the crucifixion, to drive home the reality of God’s love for us, in contrast to our own conditional love. Even so, I could benefit from more meditation on the cross and all that transpired there. I have known the facts of the Gospel for as long as I can remember, but there is a world of difference between knowing facts and letting them “dwell in you.” (Colossians 3:16) Since Jesus is the Word of God (John 1) and He lives in me, in a way that cannot be explained by either physics or biology, then the goal of my existence is to let Him do so more and more, and a major factor in that is to live out the truth of the Bible. I find myself running in linguistic and logical circles trying to explain it, because it is indeed beyond merely human understanding. (Ephesians 3:19) I need both to be caught up in the wonder of it all and to live it out in fully practical terms, letting it control every detail of my life, because the love of God is worthy of that and more.

Father, this is Good Friday indeed. Thank You for that day 2000 years ago, and thank You for all that You have planned for today. Help me live each moment of today in right relationship with You and with those around me, by the love that only You can supply, for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!

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