Huh
So, I was listening to a sermon this morning, and these are the thoughts I had.
***
Jesus had to be who He said He was. I know liars. Liars choose simple lies. He wasn’t crazy (unless a whole lotta people were having the same hallucinations, which doesn’t happen, but this whole parenthesis is beside the point), and He didn’t want adoration, or He would have started a physical revolution, even if He was a coward, and if He’d been one, He would have sent other people to the front lines, and held himself back.
He wasn’t a coward. He didn’t run away from death. He embraced it fully, His arms stretched wide to show how much He loved us, and how He wanted to spare us unnecessary pain.
He doesn’t ask us to do easy things. (First of all, I don’t like the word “easy”. It dilutes the accomplishment.) If it were easy, we could delude ourselves into thinking we did it by ourselves. Instead, He calls us to do hard things, the impossible, so that we have no choice but to lean on Him. When we achieve the impossible, we know that it was Him allowing us to be used. But we still worked hard to do it, therefore the sense of accomplishment is an honest effort with real honest-to-goodness results.
I think that’s why I’m going where I’m going. Because, as much fun as it’s going to be, as much as I’m going to learn and grow, it will be hard. I’m not going to pretend to fool myself on that. I’m going to have to depend on God for this.
***
Jesus had to be who He said He was. I know liars. Liars choose simple lies. He wasn’t crazy (unless a whole lotta people were having the same hallucinations, which doesn’t happen, but this whole parenthesis is beside the point), and He didn’t want adoration, or He would have started a physical revolution, even if He was a coward, and if He’d been one, He would have sent other people to the front lines, and held himself back.
He wasn’t a coward. He didn’t run away from death. He embraced it fully, His arms stretched wide to show how much He loved us, and how He wanted to spare us unnecessary pain.
He doesn’t ask us to do easy things. (First of all, I don’t like the word “easy”. It dilutes the accomplishment.) If it were easy, we could delude ourselves into thinking we did it by ourselves. Instead, He calls us to do hard things, the impossible, so that we have no choice but to lean on Him. When we achieve the impossible, we know that it was Him allowing us to be used. But we still worked hard to do it, therefore the sense of accomplishment is an honest effort with real honest-to-goodness results.
I think that’s why I’m going where I’m going. Because, as much fun as it’s going to be, as much as I’m going to learn and grow, it will be hard. I’m not going to pretend to fool myself on that. I’m going to have to depend on God for this.