2023-03-14 A Meditation on Reliable Amidst Plight
“The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” (Ro 7:10 ESV)
Reliability alongside plight, strong for the task yet shouting at the air, grounded yet susceptible to the entire sky castle crashing down: there is peculiar quality and gratitude for what New Life the Christian soldier does demonstrate. For it is in spite of the plight. It is irregardless of the inner dynamo, lashing out, afraid, meeting spiritual warfare with early concessions. We no longer concede but, with nurture from above, we are no longer a basket case.
We have learned an off-loaded reliability: we are reliable not because of ourselves, but in spite of ourselves; we have off-loaded the responsibility to a willing friend. In certainty that God met strange life in all its manifest insanity, head-on, in full awareness of the manicky shout or the sin-warrior’s self under assault, that He arrived specifically for this.
Not for the polite “Of course’s” of church life and worship together, those “Of course’s” where we plead, “Today I am calm and with all my wits about me; show me some small signs of worship and of penitence: I can do it!” We can indeed, but today invite the Spirit to minister to us in ways that test our boundaries of coherence, that test our boundaries of cause-effect balance, that test our boundaries of cohesive explanatory device. Yes, I did say a moment ago I was a sinner; but what I didn’t count on, is just how much my former self—or a self “out there”—is vying via spiritual warfare, to upset the apple cart and to unchange me, to restore a former modicum of compromise.
See me with beauteous consequential dreams one moment, then—as time drifts on—suddenly asked to deny my very statements of faith. See all this, and go to the trenches wiser, wizened by life Experience, to drop the posh show of it all and dwell nearer my God to thee. Who loved us as we floundered. Who loved us as we boasted. For whom there was never a step taken too far in the way of embarrassing rebellion; who pleads with us to value our composure and our living word, faith statement, because He does value them.
Infinitely valued, we see each other in new light, as deserving now, entitled now, that Christ has purchased our motoring-along lives by His own Blood. All are entitled to this Grace. All are welcome to bask in its radiance, to wear the glimmer in the eyes and the sun-tanned frame, to calm and rest in the quality of life afforded by His sacrifice made in His trenches and His far sight of what the warfare has gotten up to by now.