Good Monday morning! Sorry, but good and Monday do not make an oxymoron. Welcome to the new week of working for God's glory! For those of you who must go "up the hill" here in Sidney, Monday is still a glorious opportunity to bring glory to God's name. Have you ever considered encouraging someone with the simple mention of our most basic facts of faith? We may search for deep words, long words, and the so-called 10 dollar words to impress each other, but the real encouragement might be just a simple reminder. Jesus loves you! That simple reminder is more encouraging to me than an entire thesaurus of fancy words. God cares for you! That simple statement gives more peace than all the peace treaties ever signed on this earth. For what is peace but the gift Jesus gave to us?
We tend to think opposite from our upbringing and training in this world. We give more power to darkness when we define it in our hearts as the absence of light. But God created light to drive out the darkness. Even distant stars shine with light that goes on and on. If you wake up in a dark room, a simple turn of the light switch on your lamp banishes the darkness. The dark must hide in shadows behind objects and in corners. You don't turn on a darkness lamp (now there's an oxymoron!) to banish the light at the end of the day, do you? During the reign of Christ on the new Earth, we are promised that the light of Jesus will shine constantly so that the light of sun and moon is not needed. God is light and Jesus is the Light of the World. When we walk through the valley of death's shadow, the Light is with us. In the same way, peace is not simply an absence of war.
When Jesus gave us his peace, he did not contradict his own statement of bringing the sword. Jesus gave us the peace that lasts even in the midst of this spiritual war we wage each and every day. We war against the lust of our own fallen flesh and against the powers of evil. Of course, the Holy Spirit is in us and reminds of that peace given by Jesus. In our fallen nature, we tend to forget that peace at times. We look at the war and get anxious; when in fact we should be looking at the peace and dropping those worries. A simple reading of a history book or a viewing of the news headlines will show that Jesus did bring the sword of war to the world. Turning our gaze to the Bible, we read that one day, one day soon, Jesus will return to bring a new peace to a new world. What a glorious promise! The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing!
Have a beautiful new week!
Bucky
No comments:
Post a Comment