The Dangerous Grace of the Cross

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I am only beginning to explore this journey that is Lent. This season was not a part of my faith tradition growing up, but it seems to be growing more popular among evangelicals these days.

This long season of Lent is not a frivolous sort of giving up as it appeared to a fairly oblivious teenage self (fasting from M&M’s anyone?) but a giving up for the purpose of giving away. It is a period of self-denial in order to become more unified with the Spirit of Christ.

It is a difficult thing to be unified with Jesus.

Gazing into the eyes of Christ for too long has frightening consequences.

When you stare at the cross, you find yourself looking at your own death, at your sin and its just consequence. You come face to face with all of the spiritual deformities that are in your own soul and find yourself tempted to turn away from the harsh reflection.

When you gaze at Christ crucified for these forty days that are Lent, you are pulled close to the grace and forgiveness of your death finished for you. But it is a dangerous grace.

This grace is one that does not leave you unfinished. It is a grace that purges and renews.

The purpose of Lent is to awaken in you a sense of your own sin, your guilt for your sin, and your sorrow over your sin.

The purpose of Lent is to awaken “the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To (awaken) or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of the gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.” (Edna Hong in Bread and Wine)

This grace can only be approached at the end of Lent.

It is a long journey, these forty days.

It is a necessary journey, one that fights the apathy and smugness of this world in which we often find it easy to spot deformities in the souls of others and find it also easy to turn away from the crippled places of our own souls.

Yet we do not travel this path of Lent alone.

God’s Spirit Himself travels with us, maneuvering us down this steep path that ends at the foot of the cross.

As we stand at the foot of the cross, stripped of our illusions about ourselves, we gaze at the battered and broken body of the One who came to rescue us.

This body of Jesus that is our grace. This grace that brings fire. This fire that purges and cleanses and does not consume but instead resurrects us into a new self.

It is beautiful, this amazing and dangerous grace.

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie
My grace all sufficient shall be your supply.
The flame shall not hurt you, my only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.
~ How Firm a Foundation

edited from the archives

Credit to Edna Hong and Walter Wangerin in Bread and Wine for many of the ideas in this post.

Photography is copyright Made Sacred 2018

Book links are affiliate links which allow you to support this website when you purchase a book, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.

The Eclipse of God

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

One dark night, God the Son pleaded with God the Father

and was answered by silence.

One dark afternoon, God the Son cried out to God the Father

and was answered by the turning of His back.

The Father rejected the Son and the Son experienced “the dark night of the soul, in which everything that makes life something living withers away, and in which hope vanishes.” (Jurgen Moltmann)

For the parents who have just lost their child

For the girl who has just been raped

For the man who has just lost his job

For the woman who is drowning in loneliness

the only answer to your cry of Why? Why, oh God, why? is not a because

it is an experience.

The reality of whatever makes you feel what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God can only be answered by the reality experienced by Jesus.

“‘For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you.'” (Jurgen Moltmann)

The Jesus whose cry was met with silence, the Jesus who was rejected by God, He is the friend to whom we can confide everything because He has suffered everything that has happened to us.

And more.

For into our unanswered cry to God, He came.

He came and entered into the darkness and the suffering to be with us.

He came as a brother to sit with us in our fears, our weeping, our brokenness.

He came as a mother to reclaim His own. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.“

“He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn His face from us, however much we turn our face from Him.” (Peter Kreeft)

It is the truth Corrie ten Boom spoke from the hell of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”

And because He came, He can answer our cry with His reality.

He can answer our reality with the experience of His reality that no matter how dark the eclipse of God, it is always followed by the blinding dawn of the resurrection.

Art Credits: The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Resurrection by Luca Giordano; Der Engel öffnet das Grab Christi by Benjamin Gerrisz Cuyp; all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

Value in Our Lenten Suffering

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Elizabeth

I am relaxing with my family away from the internet this week. To follow last week’s post on Lenten suffering, I have pulled this related post from the archives. Read, be blessed, and go enjoy your own family and friends.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Where in the world but in Christianity?

Where in the world could you find a premise about life that ekes value out of suffering?

Suffering happens. There is no denying this. But to find value in this suffering that is common to us all?

The ancient Jews had come to understand this.

Isaiah. Jeremiah. Daniel. The Psalms.

This theory of the way life works finds its fulfillment in Jesus, of course.

…He learned obedience through what He suffered. And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.

To be made perfect.

This is our goal, our telos, or vision of life toward which our whole being is aimed.

To bring glory to God and to be God’s rulers on earth.

How? By being made like Jesus.

And it is our obedience in the middle of our suffering that brings this about.

Whether we are suffering from what others have done to us, whether we are suffering from grief or pain, whether we are simply suffering because our faithful lives are out of step with the people and powers of this world, when we are obedient in this suffering, we are made like Jesus.

Obedience in little things, every day, is practice for the urgent things, the catastrophes.

Obedience daily prepares us, is the only thing that can prepare us, for obedience in suffering

We celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope.

Our hope is for the glory of God.

His glory is both the divine stewardship of this earth entrusted to us and the return of His presence to His people after our long exile.

Our hope is to be made like Jesus.

To be made perfect, as He is perfect.

This is the value in our suffering.

This is what makes it all worth it in the end.

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.

Art credit: All photographs are mine, copyright Made Sacred 2018

God’s Lenten Love

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Lent is a time of self-denial, a time of sacrifice.

Lent is a time of giving up, a time of letting go.

Lent is a time of death.

Perhaps it seems strange that a God Who claims to be Love would ask for His beloved to practice such harsh disciplines.

The difficulty often lies in our idea of love.

We see love as sweet and soft, as gift giving and hugs, as making someone happy.

God’s love, however, is a fiery love.

God’s love is a love that cares so fiercely about His beloved’s joy that He refuses to leave anything in His beloved that might diminish that joy.

God Who is love asks us to die to ourselves because He knows that you cannot have glory without suffering.

He knows from experience that you cannot have resurrection without death.

Lent has already begun, but it is not too late to begin practicing how to die to yourself.

Fast for a meal or two; give up television for an evening. Use that time to read God’s words and pray.

Set aside thirty minutes to practice solitude and silence. Go somewhere you can be completely alone and try to still your mind and listen to God.

These habits take practice, so start small.

Let God’s Spirit teach you how to deny yourself, to give up, to sacrifice.

Learn how to die.

Only then can God give you His resurrection.

Learn how to Lent, and God will give you Easter.

all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

God Revealed

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

God, where are you?

We who live in this dark world are searching for the light.

We want God to show up in a big way.

We want the cancer healed, the baby conceived, the loneliness taken away.

We wonder why He won’t reveal Himself in all of His glory so that all will believe.

Why does He hide and make it so hard to find Him?

Why does He let us suffer when He could heal us all with just a Word?

We wonder why this world remains so dark.

Those at the foot of the cross wondered the same.

The chief priests mockingly wondered why He would not save Himself when He had claimed to save others.

The women weepingly wondered why He would not come down from the cross when He had healed so many others.

I begin to understand, but don’t want to admit it. So much suffering is contained in the answer.

If Jesus had come down from the cross in a blaze of glory, tens of thousands of angels at His side, He would not have gained love but would have become a tyrant.

If God were to reveal Himself in all of His glory, He would not have children who love Him for Himself but would have slaves who serve out of fear or compulsion.

God instead reveals Himself in the small. He shows Himself in the weak. His light shines through the poor, the sick, the hungry, the captive.

If we cannot find Him in the common, everyday miracle of life, we cannot love Him as Himself.

If He always arrived to take away the darkness, we would never learn to love Him. We would, instead, love the comfort of the light.

If He made it impossible to deny Him, He would be our dictator, not our Father. And we would be His cowering slaves.

He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world. ~ Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

So let us seek Him and find Him in the faces of the weak, and let us love Him as we stoop to serve the small.

Art credits: Three Crosses sketch by Rembrandt; sketch of a triumphant Christ from a German Luther Bible; all other photos copyright Made Sacred 2018

Book link is an Amazon affiliate link. By purchasing books through my affiliate link, you help to support this blog at no additional cost to you. Much gratitude.

edited from the archives

The Sharp Edges of Christ

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

We all prefer the softer side of Christ.

The Jesus who blessed the children rather than the Jesus who bade us pick up our cross.

We often desire to blur the sharp edges of Jesus, to make Him a more comfortable sort of person.

A softer Jesus is easier to live with, easier to fold into our busy lives.

Yet we are called to be God’s image bearers to and for our world and Christ shows us that in a world that is broken and full of violence, “the shape of such image-bearing will be cruciform”. (James A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom)

Jesus comes as the new Adam, the God-man who perfectly bears God’s image not by a “triumphant conquering of the world but submissive suffering for the world”. (Smith)

Following Jesus means following the crucified Messiah.

(We) are summoned to follow a leader whose eventual goal is indeed a world of blessing beyond bounds, but whose immediate goal, the only possible route to that eventual one, is a horrible and shameful death. N.T. Wright

The reality is that Jesus demands all of us. Not pieces of us, not most of us, but all of us.

And what does He want with our selves? He doesn’t only want to trim off the bad bits, He wants to kill the entire self. He wants us to die to ourselves completely.

Jesus doesn’t say that we must deny and cut out those pieces of us that are sinful. He said, “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself.”

Even the good pieces. Often it is the parts that are right and good from the world’s viewpoint that are the hardest to surrender. Yet it is that very good that stands in the way of God’s best.

And while it is true that God, in return, gives us Himself, places His own self into us and makes us into the self we were created to be, the surrender must be for the sake of Christ, not for our own benefit.

Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Many love Jesus while they are satisfied with life or as long as they receive comfort from Him in the middle of hardship, yet when Jesus hides Himself for a time, they (and, let me be transparent, I) begin to complain or even to turn their face from Him.

Would that we could love Jesus for His own sake rather than for what comfort He can give us! We would, I think, find power in that kind of love, a love that can praise Him in anguish of heart as well as in the satisfaction of abundance.

The ability to love Christ for the holy, beautiful, God of love that He is would contain within it the power to die to our natural selves. The power to take up our cross and follow Jesus and, in return, be allowed to share in His triumphal resurrection.

If you willingly carry the cross, it will carry you. It will take you to where suffering comes to an end, a place other than here. Thomas à Kempis

The whole life of Jesus was a cross, and what in this world filled with crosses gave us the idea that we could escape what God Himself took on?

Realize that to know Christ you must lead a dying life. The more you die to yourself, the more you will live unto God. Thomas à Kempis

We cannot be a person who has the capacity to enjoy heavenly things unless we have surrendered to God and allowed Him to kill off our natural self completely, giving us a new self in its place, a self that looks strangely like Jesus Himself.

You will never enjoy heavenly things unless you are ready to suffer hardship for Christ. Nothing is more acceptable to God, nothing more helpful for you on this earth. When there is a choice to be made, take the narrow way. This alone will make you more like Christ. Thomas à Kempis

May God give us the courage to take the narrow way and to be made more like Christ.

Art credits: photographs of Christ statues by asta kr; The Three Crosses sketch by Rembrandt

Emmanuel on the Cross

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

The beauty of Lent is the demonstration of God’s presence in all circumstances.

The beauty of the cross is the proof that God is with us.

Wherever you are, whatever your cross is today, God is with you.

Emmanuel. God with us.

From Advent to Lent, God stepped into His world and submitted to the same rules we must follow.

Whatever the reason we all suffer, whatever the purpose, we cannot say that God did not play fair by asking us to be subject to something He was not willing to experience.

Are you broken? Jesus is broken with you.

Are you lonely? Jesus was despised and rejected by men.

Are you betrayed by your closest loved ones? Jesus, too, was betrayed by those He loved.

Does grief seem your closest and most constant companion? Jesus grieved and wept over those who would not accept Him.

In the words of Corrie ten Boom from the hell of a Nazi concentration camp: No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.

When it feels as though life is beating you into the ground, when the weight of your burden does not allow you to rise from your bed in the morning, when you cannot carry your cross for one more step, you can know that He is here with you, carrying your cross with you, taking your burden on Himself.

Every tear we shed becomes His tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but He makes them His. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or His tear-filled ones?

He came to us. He is here with us. We can be certain of Emmanuel in all circumstances.

If He does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, He comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished.

Be nourished by the bread of life and know that He is with you.

Peace to you.

Final two quotes and many of the thoughts in this post are by Peter Kreeft in Bread and Wine

All photographs are copyrighted by Made Sacred, 2017.

The Joy of Lent

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Our hearts are deceitful.

We are often able to convince ourselves that while we may have a bit of clutter here, a messy corner there, we are mostly company-ready.

The truth is that we are homes in need of a total overhaul.

It is good now and then to take time to look deeply and ask God what He sees when He looks at our hearts.

This is Lent.

Lent has the bad reputation of being the time of year we put on our most mournful faces and give up something we love.

Quite the opposite, rather. Lent should be a time of excitement, a time when we leave shallow desires behind for our deepest longing of all, unity with Jesus.

It is meant to be the church’s springtime, a time when, out of the darkness of sin’s winter, a repentant, empowered people emerges. ~ Bread and Wine

During this season of Lent, we are marked by ashes of penitence, marked by the sign of the cross. We are asked to boldly confront the horror of our sin, which crucified Christ.

It is, after all, only when we have seen our sin for the monstrosity it is that we are able to die with Christ and thus share in His resurrection and triumph.

Use the opportunity that is Lent to confront that feeling of lingering guilt, that nagging sensation that you are missing something. No more making excuses, no more hanging on to the remaining shreds of goodness you think you have; rather ask God to show you what you truly look like.

We must face up to the reality that it was our sin that sent Jesus to the tortures of the cross.

The joy of Lent comes when we truly see our sin and turn from it into Christ’s open arms. It comes when we understand that the very cross on which we hung Jesus is the same cross that cleanses us from our sin.

Once we have looked full on our sin, we must turn away from ourselves and look full in the face of Christ. Let His resurrection propel you into the abundant life He promised. The life that is the beginning of making God’s kingdom a reality here on earth.

Let us use Lent as a time of repentence and fasting so that at the end of this season we are able to step boldly out of the winter of our sin. It is spring, and we have the power of the risen Christ in us.

He has risen!

He has risen, indeed!

He Is Saying Your Name

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

I have lived deep in pain.

When I wanted a baby and God said not yet.

When my brother called and said of his pregnant wife, it’s cancer.

When my Papa died the day my baby was born.

I have lost friends and family, I have been disappointed and lonely.

As have most of you.

You, too, have received the doctor’s call, heard the rejecting words, felt the crippling fear and doubt.

When you are in the middle of deep, dark pain, you are blinded. Your body curls in on itself, your eyes darken with tears. You look for Jesus, desperately searching for Him, but you cannot see Him.

In the deepest pain, He is closest.

Mary stood at the tomb, searching for Him. In the middle of her deepest pain, she searched for His dead body but was blinded by her grief. Angels spoke to her and she could not see. Jesus, the One she searched for, stood behind her and she thought He was the gardener.

And then.

Mary.

He is right here. As close as your very breath. And He is saying your name.

Look up. Wipe your tears away for just a moment and listen.

He is saying your name.

He has not left you. He is there, speaking to you. Can you hear Him?

He died and is alive and because of that resurrection, there is new closeness with Him.

I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

There is resurrection and now there is intimacy that was not possible before.

In the middle of your deepest pain, do not wonder anymore where Jesus is.

Turn around. He is right there behind you. Closer than He’s ever been.

And He is saying your name.

The Day God is Dead

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Elizabeth

Holy Saturday.

The day God is dead.

The day we lose God Himself.

Don’t miss this. Don’t rush through it. On the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, God is dead.

One part of the Trinity, yes, but God nonetheless.

The Word of God is gone. We can no longer hear Him.

Linger in this day. Does the earth feel different? Somehow vacant?

There is, for this day, no possible way to reach God.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

No Most Holy Place where the high priest could meet with God.

It is finished.

He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.

No Word of God in whom we can see the Father.

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

Remain in this day as long as you can. I don’t understand how, but somehow this day exists on which we are completely isolated from God.

Breathe in the horror of this day. God is dead. He is, for this day, unattainable. Can you catch even a glimpse?

The disciples did. They lived it for what must have felt like an eternity.

We’d rather skip past this day, this Saturday that contains Christ’s body in the tomb. Yet we must linger if we are to grasp the power of Easter Sunday. We must dwell here awhile if we are to be allowed to hold the joy of Easter Sunday.

When the Son, the Word of the Father is dead, then no one can see God, hear of Him or attain Him. And this day exists, when the Son is dead, and the Father, accordingly, inaccessible. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar (theologian and author)

Can you feel the terror of it? Do you sense the incomprehensible void that stretches before us on this day? What does it even mean?

Do not rush too quickly past this Holy Saturday on your way to the miracle. You may miss the deepest part of the gratitude and joy that are to come.

The deepest gratitude and joy that come only when you understand what was absent, and understand that it was only for a day.

Art credits: Preparation of Christ’s Tomb by Vittore Carpaccio; Tomb of knight Philip Keerman in Flanders, Belgium; 1912 photograph of Jerusalem Garden Tomb by Dwight Lathrop Elmendorf; Side view of Garden Tomb by Deror Avi; Jerusalem Garden Tomb by Berthold Werner

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I am only beginning to explore this journey that is Lent. This season was not a part of my faith tradition growing up, but it seems to be growing more popular among evangelicals these days.

This long season of Lent is not a frivolous sort of giving up as it appeared to a fairly oblivious teenage self (fasting from M&M’s anyone?) but a giving up for the purpose of giving away. It is a period of self-denial in order to become more unified with the Spirit of Christ.

It is a difficult thing to be unified with Jesus.

Gazing into the eyes of Christ for too long has frightening consequences.

When you stare at the cross, you find yourself looking at your own death, at your sin and its just consequence. You come face to face with all of the spiritual deformities that are in your own soul and find yourself tempted to turn away from the harsh reflection.

When you gaze at Christ crucified for these forty days that are Lent, you are pulled close to the grace and forgiveness of your death finished for you. But it is a dangerous grace.

This grace is one that does not leave you unfinished. It is a grace that purges and renews.

The purpose of Lent is to awaken in you a sense of your own sin, your guilt for your sin, and your sorrow over your sin.

The purpose of Lent is to awaken “the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To (awaken) or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of the gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.” (Edna Hong in Bread and Wine)

This grace can only be approached at the end of Lent.

It is a long journey, these forty days.

It is a necessary journey, one that fights the apathy and smugness of this world in which we often find it easy to spot deformities in the souls of others and find it also easy to turn away from the crippled places of our own souls.

Yet we do not travel this path of Lent alone.

God’s Spirit Himself travels with us, maneuvering us down this steep path that ends at the foot of the cross.

As we stand at the foot of the cross, stripped of our illusions about ourselves, we gaze at the battered and broken body of the One who came to rescue us.

This body of Jesus that is our grace. This grace that brings fire. This fire that purges and cleanses and does not consume but instead resurrects us into a new self.

It is beautiful, this amazing and dangerous grace.

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie My grace all sufficient shall be your supply. The flame shall not hurt you, my only design Your dross to consume and your gold to refine. ~ How Firm a Foundation

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

One dark night, God the Son pleaded with God the Father

and was answered by silence.

One dark afternoon, God the Son cried out to God the Father

and was answered by the turning of His back.

The Father rejected the Son and the Son experienced “the dark night of the soul, in which everything that makes life something living withers away, and in which hope vanishes.” (Jurgen Moltmann)

For the parents who have just lost their child

For the girl who has just been raped

For the man who has just lost his job

For the woman who is drowning in loneliness

the only answer to your cry of Why? Why, oh God, why? is not a because

it is an experience.

The reality of whatever makes you feel what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God can only be answered by the reality experienced by Jesus.

“‘For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you.'” (Jurgen Moltmann)

The Jesus whose cry was met with silence, the Jesus who was rejected by God, He is the friend to whom we can confide everything because He has suffered everything that has happened to us.

And more.

For into our unanswered cry to God, He came.

He came and entered into the darkness and the suffering to be with us.

He came as a brother to sit with us in our fears, our weeping, our brokenness.

He came as a mother to reclaim His own. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.“

“He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn His face from us, however much we turn our face from Him.” (Peter Kreeft)

It is the truth Corrie ten Boom spoke from the hell of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”

And because He came, He can answer our cry with His reality.

He can answer our reality with the experience of His reality that no matter how dark the eclipse of God, it is always followed by the blinding dawn of the resurrection.

I am relaxing with my family away from the internet this week. To follow last week’s post on Lenten suffering, I have pulled this related post from the archives. Read, be blessed, and go enjoy your own family and friends.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Where in the world but in Christianity?

Where in the world could you find a premise about life that ekes value out of suffering?

Suffering happens. There is no denying this. But to find value in this suffering that is common to us all?

The ancient Jews had come to understand this.

Isaiah. Jeremiah. Daniel. The Psalms.

This theory of the way life works finds its fulfillment in Jesus, of course.

…He learned obedience through what He suffered. And being made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.

To be made perfect.

This is our goal, our telos, or vision of life toward which our whole being is aimed.

To bring glory to God and to be God’s rulers on earth.

How? By being made like Jesus.

And it is our obedience in the middle of our suffering that brings this about.

Whether we are suffering from what others have done to us, whether we are suffering from grief or pain, whether we are simply suffering because our faithful lives are out of step with the people and powers of this world, when we are obedient in this suffering, we are made like Jesus.

Obedience in little things, every day, is practice for the urgent things, the catastrophes.

Obedience daily prepares us, is the only thing that can prepare us, for obedience in suffering

We celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope.

Our hope is for the glory of God.

His glory is both the divine stewardship of this earth entrusted to us and the return of His presence to His people after our long exile.

Our hope is to be made like Jesus.

To be made perfect, as He is perfect.

This is the value in our suffering.

This is what makes it all worth it in the end.

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Lent is a time of self-denial, a time of sacrifice.

Lent is a time of giving up, a time of letting go.

Lent is a time of death.

Perhaps it seems strange that a God Who claims to be Love would ask for His beloved to practice such harsh disciplines.

The difficulty often lies in our idea of love.

We see love as sweet and soft, as gift giving and hugs, as making someone happy.

God’s love, however, is a fiery love.

God’s love is a love that cares so fiercely about His beloved’s joy that He refuses to leave anything in His beloved that might diminish that joy.

God Who is love asks us to die to ourselves because He knows that you cannot have glory without suffering.

He knows from experience that you cannot have resurrection without death.

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie
My grace all sufficient shall be your supply.
The flame shall not hurt you, my only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.
~ How Firm a Foundation