Life in Jesus Isn't about Suffering

 

 

Tell the truth. If you were born before 1990, didn't Sunday worship at church sometimes feel like being at a place of mourning, especially when there was communion? I remember how, when asked why not be at church, a relative once said, "No one died lately." But, since I've grown to know Jesus, that's the relative I have most hoped will be preserved blameless until Jesus returns to be among everyone in this world (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

And that isn't my only prayer.

I also pray that many sisters and brothers who are Muslim, will know Jesus the way I do. The way I know Jesus is set free from a constant review of child-like sins and mourning.

Life in Jesus — the life Heaven gave us through Jesus at Calvary — isn't a life of continual struggle and suffering. Although, in contrast, Islam tends to continually sacrifice life for life, to wrongly read biblical texts to mean we should cherish suffering, and to even practice whipping oneself with chains and cords, Christianity says Jesus has overcome the world; that He has given us traditions not like the world's; and that He wills us to have mercy instead of a continual heaping on of debt, sin, and dying.

Jesus also has told us He is our best example. He said that, although persecution is inevitable in the world the way it is now, He has never meant for us to remain persecuted. If any of us was appointed to suffer persecution, it was meant only during a difficult a season in the life of the church, and our suffering wasn't meant to do what Jesus already has done for us: Our suffering tests our faith but doesn't open anyone's eyes to how, through Jesus, we're set free from being bound to hell.

And just think: Even Jesus came down from the cross.

By the way, when the apostle Paul rejoiced that he had been "crucified with Christ," he didn't mean that life in Jesus is unstoppable suffering. Instead, Paul was saying that he had died to his old way of living — that he no longer was a murderer, not even in his heart. Paul had found new life, a new way of understanding and living. He had gone from being chief of sinners, to saving many souls. And the one thing he mourned was that there was a war in the church (a battle in the "body" of Christ). Those things he didn't want the body to do, the body was doing, anyway. And Paul knew that souls were being lost.

One lost soul was a man who was corrupting the church through being unrepentant about being in sin with his father's wife. Paul so hated that sin, that he said to put that man out of church, to give that man over to the devil to be castrated. Putting members of the church away from the main body is what Jesus meant when He said that, if the eye won't stop offending the body, to cast the eye away from the body.

But, being Christian, Paul knew that members of the body of Christ, even those who are cast away, are able to repent and to serve. That's the whole nature of knowing Jesus. So Paul reasoned: What can repentant Christian hands and feet do without those repentant eyes that want to serve?

Paul transitioned from being a persecutor of Christians, to being a minister who helped Christians repent and rejoin the church.

Also, in the new life that Paul loved, he realized he didn't have anything to be ashamed of in eating the food that Heaven intends for us to. After all, it was Heaven that told Peter to wake up and hunt for spiritually acceptable food, to eat the acceptable meats that were being served by those Gentiles who he was meant to minister to. A calling to eat nourishing foods with Gentiles was God's way of bringing Jewish believers together with people who had not believed at all — a means of helping to spread Heaven's Gospel.

Remember, life, under Heaven, does go on. After all, Jesus had at least two meals after getting up from the grave: one meal in a meeting place where disciples were probably so deep in mourning and eating that they had not noticed Him in the room, and another meal on the shore of the sea of Galilee.

It's as if Heaven was assuring us: Go ahead. Eat, and live.

We have a Savior who came down from the cross.

 

 

"So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God."

1 Corinthians 10:31, CSB

We Shouldn't Underestimate How Good God Is

 

 

 

Heaven gives special, very strong families the responsibility of raising a child with disabilities.

I thank the Lord there is that care. Because, many children with extreme disabilities do thrive.

From a faith perspective, that's a blessing, for a disabled child to thrive. But, for some, it's difficult to understand why Heaven cherishes the disabled, the same as the perfectly able.

It's also difficult for some to understand how supportive people in the life of a disabled person may value milestones in that person's life, the same as parents who sometimes remember a child's first words, first steps, and first quirks. Yet a simple fact of life is that, in faith, a child has worth, regardless of ability.

That said, I am a disabled person. I'm also a Christian.

And I thank God, I wasn't restricted or limited, as a child, to special classes. Instead, I learned in ordinary classrooms. And supportive people quickly saw I had a good aptitude for English language in writing — even an aptitude for creative writing and abstract language.

And, while I can never be a rap artist who races through the dangerous hairpin turns of his oral dissertations, I can understand what he's saying, if I can see it and study it in writing.