"If we regularly beheld the glory of Christ our Christian walk with God would become more sweet and pleasant, our spiritual light and strength would grow daily stronger and our lives would more gloriously represent the glory of Christ. Death would be most welcome to us."
John Owen, The Glory of Christ
happy and heavy
steady
wobbling
steady
bending
breaking levees
crashing waves of Sovereign grace
foam is covering my face
drowning in the salt and spray
undertow that pulls
me
to
the
bottom
while, happy and heavy
I weather the fray
drowning under swells
laughing on the way
where,
happy and heavy
I’m fettered
to Rock
steady
wobbling
steady
happy and heavy
I’m fettered to stay
(Written on the airplane en route back to Philadelphia)
Cindy and I spent an entire week in Florida at The Wycliffe Bible Headquarters, being trained to raise support as full time missionaries through a great organization called Great Commission Ministries (GCM). What’s funny is that prior to going on the trip, so many people said, “Oh wow! Florida. . .so you’re going on vacation. Doesn’t seem fair that you’re getting to go on vacation in the middle of October.”
“It’s not going to be a vacation,” I kept saying, “We’re going to be working.”
Maybe it’s that people have selective hearing or the assumption that anytime anyone here’s the word ‘Florida’ they automatically think Mickey Mouse, Universal Studios and orange groves. Well, for the record, I did not see Mickey Mouse (which I’m happy about), but I did see at least fifty speedy, little salamanders; none of them could save me any money on my car insurance, even though I asked several times. We did get the chance to go to Universal Studio’s City Walk, but that was because it was our new friend Charlie’s 40th birthday. Furthermore, I saw no orange groves, or oranges (go figure) and I drank no orange juice (mostly Starbuck’s coffee and water). It was officially not a vacation and God’s grace was all over the entire trip.
God’s grace was evident in “small ways”--Cindy and I are on a budget. This means that we were only traveling with ex-amount of dollars and weren’t planning on spending anymore. We walked into Philadelphia International Airport with sixty dollars and after checking our bag and getting coffee (which, in the airport, costs twice the price of every place else in the entire world) walked off the plane in Orlando with thirty dollars in cash. Our pre-trip GCM instruction manual told us that a cab from the airpot would run us close to thirty dollars, so Cindy’s budgeting skills were on point. We hopped into a cab and immediately I thought, “there’s no way this thing is gonna cost thirty dollars. I’m gonna have to wash the cab to pay off the rest of our trip.” You’re probably familiar with the feeling; the meter is like a guillotine only it moves in slow motion. You watch it and hope that doesn’t reach your neck before you have time to squirm free and get out of harms way. As I’m watching the price on the meter ascend at what seems like an unreasonable pace, I get a text from a faithful friend. It read, “I’m prayin’ for u with the body...any requests? You got five minutes.” I know this means that my friends are at church and they’re going to pray in five minutes before service starts. I text, as fast as my fingers can move, “That God would give us a unified growing faith and that we would increase in the fruits of 2 Peter 1:3-11 while we’re here...And that the cab fare would be thirty bucks or less cause that’s what I have in my pocket.”
Cindy didn’t know that I asked for prayer, she just watched the meter and gave me the “oh no babe” signal (a squeeze of the leg).
With faith in the prayers of the righteous I said, “We’ll be fine.”
As we approached Wycliffe, the meter seemed a little “sluggish” (What could it be?)--The meter read, $26.43.
“Oh wow! That’s great!”, Cindy said.
“Yup, yup,” I said.
I am someone who doesn’t really make a big deal about things like that. In my unbelief, I don’t always see God in them. Something like that will happen and I’ll think, “Well, that’s just the meter...” or “It was only ten minutes away, what did you expect?” I see God’s grace in big things, not “little” things. Often times it is the “little” outpourings of God’s grace that are the greatest testimonies of His Sovereignty.
The clincher for me was when Cindy and I were riding back to the airport with some friends from the training to catch our return flight to Philly. We caught a ride with a friend and were talking about how other people decided to catch a cab to the airport instead.
“I caught a cab from the airport to the training when I came in,” someone said. (The same airport and same cab service Cindy and I used--there’s only one).
“Yea, we did too,” said someone else.
“So did we,” said Cindy.
“That cost too much money,” someone number one said.
“Yea!”, said someone number two.
“Oh...how much did it cost you guys?” my wife asked.
Both someones said, with raised voices, “Forty dollars!”
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel."Mark 1:14-15
For our sake he made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.2 Corinthians 5:21
That is the gift; never ending grace from God towards sinners, through the channel of His crucified Son, is the consequence of trusting in the Cross. I know this . . . don't I? I do, but, the roots go deeper than that for me and for all of us who call ourselves followers of Christ.
Obviously, initial believe upon Jesus is never enough, an initial "beholding" of Jesus as Savior, God and King is not enough, a moment of grace is not enough for a lifetime filled with doubts, failures, and different manifestations of unbelief. We need "grace upon grace" (John 1:16). Like the father of the boy with the unclean spirit, we who believe need daily help in our unbelief (Mark 9:24) and in that we need to "keep with repentance" (Matthew 3:8;Luke 3:8; Acts 26:20).
Jesus' call to "repent and believe the gospel" is not merely a call to be saved, it is a call to be saved and be "being saved" (1 Cor 1:18; 2 Cort 2:15). It is a call "to repent and believe the gospel" and continue to repent and believe gospel. Every one of my failures is filled with shards of unbelief in some facet of the Gospel of Christ. So, in response to my failures I need to repent, turn from them and turn to and believe in the one who has never failed or missed the mark. This is the "rinse and repeat" of my life (and every Christian's life). Repenting and believing in the Gospel is how we deal with the failures of life. If we don't handle them that way, they will deal with us harshly.
This blog was for me; if you read it and were sharpened, gently rebuked or encouraged then you shared in grace with me.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith--that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.Ephesians 3:14-19
"The fire in the bush which was there only temporarily, was a type of him in whom 'the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily', and that for ever (Col 2:9). The eternal fire of the divine nature dwells in the bush of our frail nature, yet our frail nature is not destroyed. So God dwells in this bush, with all his goodwill towards sinners." (p.30)
