Monday, February 8, 2021
God’s Path for Us
Is Filled with Golden Moments
To Bring Us Together.
Judges 5:31
‘So perish all your enemies, O Lord! But may your friends be like the sun as it rises in its might.’ And the land had rest for forty years.
John 17:22
The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
God creates.
God creates order for all of creation … and for us.
Peace and rest come only when God’s order prevails.
From a very limited human perspective it may seem that when one’s enemies perish and one’s friends rise like the sun with might, then God’s good order prevails. Thus the passage that when one’s enemies have perished and when the sun rises on one’s friends the land can rest for as long as it takes … for forty years.
Reality is different: God’s will does not eliminate enemies by making them perish. God’s will eliminates enemies by converting them to friends. And that is the key to celebrating God’s love for us, to know that God does not wish us ill. God does everything to offer us the greatest thing, God adopts us as children even when we are yet still God’s enemies.
It is everything that God wishes us well. God breathes the essence and the best of life into us, and through us to the rest of all people and all creation.
It is God’s unconditional love for us that drives us to answer God’s call to follow Jesus. Just as in this pandemic we really do not know what will come next, so we know not where Jesus will ask us to follow. We do know from his ministry that Jesus does not overthrow governments, neither does Jesus take us into retreat from the world. Jesus takes us out into the world to meet people with diseases to heal them, with demons to free them, and with doubts to reassure them of God’s good will to all of creation.
It is for us no more a tried and true path that Jesus (also during this pandemic) calls us to follow him on than it was for the fishermen near Capernaum. The path we tread, though full of challenges, is an exciting life. It is life as we were created and redeemed to live.