Good Thursday morning! The cold of winter is back for a visit this morning along with a bit of snow. The desk is a mess as I have started the annual digging out of the tax papers. And God is still sovereign in case the world has tried to convince you otherwise on this fine morning. Have you lost God's love today? Have you misplaced it somewhere so that you got up feeling unloved or had a night of tossing and turning that left you feeling unrested which must surely mean that God loves you a bit less today? Some mornings we get up and think that God's love must not be with us. How else to explain how we feel? We know better, but the thought still grabs us at times. God's love is of course not affected by our feelings of the moment. Other days we get up and immediately have a reminder of a past or present sin in our lives. Surely God doesn't love us quite so much in light of that! No, once again, God decided to love us, his fumbling, bumbling creation, and sent His only Son to die in our place.
One day a certain angel we have come to know by various names got up feeling perfect. Immediately he desired to set his throne higher than God's and also at that moment became something else... something no longer as perfect as he thought himself. If you get up one morning feeling perfect, you may want to check your surroundings right quick. God tossed that I'm-so-perfect thinking angel right out of Heaven, and we read in the Bible that the same angel will one day be chained and cast into the lake of fire. Since we are already on this earth, we only have one place to fall. Yikes! Maybe getting up not feeling just perfect isn't a sign of God's displeasure after all!
We as humans have a tendency to place on God the things that we think we know. Each morning you and me get up not feeling just perfect leads us from our meager experience to think that somehow God has bad days too. Do you know that the Bible has no recording of God having a bad day, the Trinity meeting in emergency session (as Pastor Rogers liked to say), or Jesus rushing to be anywhere on time. God never apologized for smiting the Israelites in a time they didn't deserve punishment, in fact He often put off punishment when a king or the people repented. Jesus never apologized for stepping on the Pharisees' scriptural toes without cause. And when Jesus went through a series of bad days at the end of his earthly life the cause was not a mistake of his own, but a whole lot of sins that we had a part in. Our fumbling, bumbling feelings just don't seem to tell the whole story!
A paraphrase of the Bible: God created everything and gave a couple of humans a choice. Eve fumbled the choice, and Adam bumbled when God asked him about the fumble. God sent the fumbling, bumbling humans out to live in a fallen world. God gave those fumblers and bumblers the Law, a perfect standard to which not one of them would ever fail to fumble and bumble his way to eternal condemnation. God sent an ark captain to keep one family as a seed to start over after the fumbling and bumbling reached pandemic proportions. Since all of the people once again proved so adept at fumbling and bumbling, God set aside only one chosen people and sent them judges, kings, and prophets to warn them that He would always be watching - don't fumble and bumble. Not one of even the chosen people could meet the perfect standard set down by God. Many was the time that God's chosen people seemed to fumble on purpose!
Finally, God sent His own perfect solution to an imperfect gang of fumblers and bumblers. The man, Jesus, never fumbled or bumbled in his entire life; a life that ended when the fumblers and bumblers refused to believe that God would do exactly as He had told the prophets he would do. The Light of the World died on a cross holding our shame and sin. From the Seed planted in the earth, on the third day a new Christ emerged victorious from the tomb. So new that the first human fumbled her recognition of Him. However, to all the fumblers and bumblers in the world forgiveness and grace now shone in the darkness. God said: Believe on my Risen Son, and grace is yours even when you fumble and bumble. God then sent an ever growing group of men and women out into the dark world to shine his light. These men and women did at times fumble and bumble too, not one of them had become perfect just yet. However, the Word spread like wildfire because of one great promise: The Light of the World would return to receive unto himself those poor fumblers and bumblers who would believe on Him!
When you go through your day, fumbling and bumbling, stumbling and mumbling, perhaps even daring to do a little grumbling, remember the grace that is yours in Christ Jesus!
Bucky
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