Life

Life.  Such a simple word.  A word loaded with complexity and meaning and yet so very simple. 

Life.  It is immediately recognizable and immediately evident when it is absent.  It is often taken for granted and overlooked, but its absence brings reminders of all of its glory.  Life. 

We fight for the right to life.  We consider it precious.  We want it and pursue keeping it at all costs.  Life.

I wonder if you have considered the enormous gift of life.  I say it is a gift because apart from the work of another you would not have it.  I am not here referring to your mother without whose work you also would not be here, but I am speaking more importantly of the life giving work of the Son of God.  Without his work none of us would have even the possibility of life.  We might breathe, we might work, we might exist, but we would be dead in our trespasses and sin apart from His glorious Life. 

And His Life he freely offers as a gift to all those who would believe that He is not only the Author of Life but that He gave His own Life to be a substitute for my own.  So that the Life I now live is not my own but lived by faith in Him!  The eternal Life that I receive as a free gift through the faith He enables starts now and continues for. . . you guessed it - eternity!  Life.  Never-ending Life.

And we owe it all to the man who was crucified.  Who died.  But death could not hold him.  Life cannot be undone in this ultimate sense.  Life can only continue.  So come to the fount of Living Water.  And Live.  Life. 

Grace

As I reflect on the opportunity to preach last Sunday, I think it is always good to remind ourselves that there is more that could have been said.  Or at least to remind ourselves of the truth that was spoken.  It is really easy to wake up on any given morning and forget that without Christ I am nothing more than a rotten, stinky, filthy corpse. 

We go through our days and we see a world filled with merit.  Your promotions at work have never been about grace.  Your bank does not show grace when you miss a payment on your loan.  Even the library does not show grace when you hold a book for an extra week.  Our whole world runs on merit.  You have to work hard.  You have to pay money.  You have to accomplish and earn.  If you do not, you will not have the things that you want.  Grace is something that is foreign to us and so we go to bed in a world that does not exemplify grace and we wake up in a world that seems to hate it. 

And yet here I am.  I am a rotten, stinky, filthy corpse that has been saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone!  What a glorious truth.  And this truth drives me to reach out to other corpses who have not yet found themselves alive in Christ!  This truth drives me to a humility that binds me to the one who raised me to life.  This truth drives me to a better understanding of the life God has called me to live, to a better knowledge of the God who raised me.  In one sense, the fact that I was dead must be a foundational truth of my faith.  It must be a part of my understanding of myself and the world in which I live.  If it is not, my theology will go awry. 

If I fail to maintain proper focus on my "corpsliness" (I know this is not a word), I might start to think God owes me something.  If I fail to keep perspective, I might think of myself more highly than I ought and I might start to think that church is all about me!  SO always remember that you were dead in your trespasses and sin and that you were made alive by God in Christ (you were even passive in the process!)  And it is all because of GRACE!