He Is Risen

            

            My husband calls me the female version of Dave Ramsey.  While I am nowhere near as experienced or knowledgeable as he is, I do enjoy working with numbers, creating charts and tables, and managing our finances.  I'm a bit of a budget nerd.  For that reason, Propoganda's description of Jesus's death and resurrection in this video speaks to my heart in a very powerful way.  The entire video is jam-packed with rich theology, but these stanzas in particular always sink deeply into my heart.  He proclaims: 

"Clearly since the only one that can meet God's criteria is God, God sent himself as Jesus to pay the cost for us.  His righteousness, His death, functions as payment.  Yes, payment.  

Wrote a check with His life, but at the resurrection we all cheered, 'cause that means the check cleared.  Pierced feet, pierced hands, blood-stained Son of Man, fullness, forgiveness, free passage into the promise land.  That same breath God breathed into us, God gave up to redeem us."

What a vivid and relatable analogy of the importance of Jesus's resurrection!  Picture this: You have a massive medical bill that needs paid off, and your insurance won't cover it.  As you desperately try to think of ways to scrimp and save, you slowly realize that nothing you can do will ever enable you to fully pay off that large of a debt.  Then, a kind and compassionate stranger offers to write a check for the entire balance, no strings attached.  Of course you would have a glimmer of hope that you might really be free from your debt, but you wouldn't know for sure if this stranger really had the money in his bank account.  You could only rest in certainty and freedom after seeing that the payment was accepted by the hospital because the check cleared.  

Jesus's resurrection gives us certainty that His payment for our sin was accepted by God.  Without it, we would have no way of knowing whether Jesus's death was of any real significance at all.  We would have no assurance of forgiveness or freedom.  We would have no way of knowing that He was not just another dead man who taught nice principles.  Paul describes it like this: "And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.  In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost!  And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world" (1 Cor. 15:17-19 NLT). 

Praise God that Christ has in fact been raised from the dead!  My debt has been paid in full (which is the literal meaning of Jesus's final words, recorded in Jn. 19:30, that He spoke just before giving up His spirit: "It is finished.") My Savior is alive and interceding on my behalf (Heb. 8:24, 25).  My future is certain because "The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in [me].  And just as God raised Jesus from the dead, he will give life to [my] mortal [body] by this same Spirit living within [me]" (Rom. 8:11 NLT).  I live, and live abundantly, because He lives!  

Jesus's resurrection offers true hope.  This hope is not the type of uncertain wish that says, "I hope that I never get into a car accident," which may or may not happen.  No, this hope is in an entirely different category.  It is a confident expectation, sure and steadfast, rooted in what we know to be true, that provides an anchor for our souls (Heb. 6:19).  What greater cause could we possibly have for celebration?  He is risen! 

A Life Unexpected (Part 1)

“Where You go, I’ll go.  Where You stay, I’ll stay.”

-“I Will Follow” by Chris Tomlin, Jason Ingram, & Reuben Morgan

The caterpillar sat on a small branch with the front third of his fuzzy body stretched up to the sky. 

“I was born to fly!” he exclaimed, “I just know it!”

He was tired of spending his entire days eating and crawling, and he was certain that he was made for something more.  But try as he may, he could not lift his little non-aerodynamic body off of the branch.

Okay, so I may have read The Very Hungry Caterpillar entirely too many times in the past couple of weeks to the little boy I babysit, but this scenario provides a pretty good picture of how my husband and I have felt this past year.  Before I dive into an explanation, I need to give you a little bit of background.  Last December, God very suddenly pulled us out of full-time ministry.  We absolutely know that it needed to happen, but the necessity of the removal doesn’t change the fact that we were ripped away from a life that we absolutely loved.  For a year and a half, we were passionate about the work we were doing, and we felt like we were fulfilling God’s purpose and call for our lives by using the talents and abilities He had given us to serve Him.  Out of the blue, it all came crashing down around us, and we found ourselves carried away in a whirlwind back to the area where we attended Bible college.  Since then, our heart has always been (and still is) to return to full-time ministry eventually.  However, God has not yet given us the privilege of doing that.

In the meantime, we have been focusing on healing, growing, and learning in the midst of the daily grind of a life we didn’t choose or want.  In the beginning, I desperately needed the break from full-time ministry, so even though I was grieving heavily, it was fairly easy for me to welcome this next chapter of our story.  However, as the months have passed and I have experienced more and more healing, I have found myself battling the discontent that wants to slowly creep into my heart.  I ache with the memories of spending each day taking care of my husband and the house and working alongside him to reach into the lives of those around us in various ways.  I especially miss the Sunday nights of laughing, playing, and discussing Biblical truth with the youth and watching my husband teach them.  Without a doubt, ministry had its own set of challenges, but there’s no other way we would rather spend our lives.  Yet, that desire seems so out of reach at times.  God has been gracious to allow us to help with leading worship at our new church, and He has given us a few short windows to help with youth events every once in a while.  While we are truly grateful for the opportunities we’ve been given, we still wish that we could devote more time to ministry.  My husband and I have both struggled off and on and to different degrees with feeling like that caterpillar this year: frustrated and stuck to the tree branch when we really want to fly. 

As I was wrestling with all of this again recently, God directed my thoughts to the life of His Son.  For each struggle that entered my mind, He reminded me of a relatable situation in Jesus’s life, thereby showing that He understands exactly what I am going through:

1)  In some ways, our current situation feels like a huge step backward from where we were.  We know that’s not true, but it’s hard to get our hearts on board with what we know.  Jesus is fully God, but He humbled Himself and came to earth as a human in the absolute lowest and most helpless of ways.  What a seemingly backwards transformation!  Logic says that this must have been a derailing of the fulfillment of His true calling and purpose.  Yet, He was right where God wanted Him to be and where we needed Him to be.  This humbling transformation was not a deviation from the course or a backslide.  It was the very fulfillment of His purpose for that time.

2) We work hard because God tells us to be faithful, but sometimes it feels like we are wasting precious time investing ourselves into our secular jobs.  This is not to say that our work is at all meaningless or unimportant, but it isn’t what we  really want to do, what we believe we were really designed to do, or what we believe we are called to do in the long run.  Jesus worked as a carpenter until He was thirty. 

3) I struggle with worrying about what other people think about our situation, though I know that God is the only One I should worry about pleasing.  People thought all sorts of things about Jesus.  Some thought He was from Satan.  Others thought he was a crazy person, a liar, a pretender, and a blasphemer.  Still others thought He was just a good man or a good teacher.  The truth is all that really matters, and God sees the truth.

4) We have been tempted to rush ahead of God into ministry without really seeking His will.  Jesus was also presented with the opportunity to rush ahead of the plan when Satan tempted Him in the wilderness with all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 

Jesus understands what we are going through, which brings me comfort.  He shows me that I am equating ministry too much with serving God.  Ministry is certainly one expression of service, but service to God is ultimately obeying Him.  Obedience may look very different from what we expect.  The caterpillar is indeed made to fly in due time, but it is also made to eat and crawl in order to develop.  God is not only concerned about what we do, but who we are.  He sees our complete transformation and all of the works that He prepared in advance for us to do throughout that transformation.  Sometimes our job is to go.  Sometimes our job is to stay.  Either way, our bigger job is to trust Him, to obey Him, and to be faithful to what He has called us to do today.