Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

By Dwight Cunkle

Am I responsive to Jesus’ call to take up my cross daily, deny myself and come, follow Him into the world?

Luke 7: 31 “To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? 32 They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;  we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’48 But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

Jesus describes a people who are unresponsive, not in the mood. They can go through the motions of religion but lack passion to know and love Him and others. Like a sulky teenager, moping around, listless and bored, yet spurning all invitations and suggestions. But that is a space we have all inhabited from time to time.  What invitation to celebrate and give thanks might the Lord be making to me now, that I might not be in the mood to hear? And in what ways, that I tend not to notice, might the Lord be inviting me to sorrow and remorse for my sins-especially of focusing on others and things instead of love for Him and His word?

Read again. Can you hear the frustration in Jesus’s voice? The exasperation of one whose gentle invitations are spurned and ignored? Can I ask the Lord now to transform any moodiness in me? To help me hear his gentle  invitations in my life, and to respond with excitement and delight?

Reading biographical notes on the lives of saintly servants and martyrs inspires us to love and good works I think more than just reading popular books and certainly more than the social media and entertainment we subject ourselves to. Expose your mind to godly lives and see the Scripture come alive in daily living.

WHAT WE REJECT WHEN WE REJECT JESUS

WHAT WE REJECT WHEN WE REJECT JESUS

By Caryll Houselander

Behold the man abiding in mankind!

He has put on our humanity. He has put you on—and me. He has covered himself with our shame, blindfolded his eyes with our blindness, bound himself with our slavery to self. He is bruised by our falls. He bleeds from our wounds. He sheds our tears. He has made himself weak with our weakness. Faint with our faintheartedness. He is going to die our death.

All people are condemned to die, but he Is condemned to die not only his own death, but yours and mine, and that of every man whom he will indwell through all the ages to come.

“Behold the Son of God!”

“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased!”

He alone, of all men born, need not have died; but because things are as they are, because we have to pay the price of our sins, and our life on this earth must inevitably be a journey through suffering to death, Christ has chosen to give himself to everyone who will receive him, so that each     person who wills can tread that road with the feet of Christ, and at the end of it he can, if he wills, die not his own death but Christ's…

He has chosen our impotence in order to give us the power of his love, our weakness to give us his strength, our fear to give us his courage, our ignominy to give us his majesty, our pain to give us his peace, our wounds to give us his power to heal, our dying to give us his life, our interdependence that we may give him to one another…

Yes, and behold in him in yourself. Each one of us can recognizer himself, a sinner, in the disfiguring, the bruising, the ugliness, hiding the beauty of the fairest of the sons and daughters of men. And there can be few who do not recognize themselves, too, in the utter loneliness of this man in the midst of the crown that lately spread their garments to be trodden by the little donkey he rode on, and no clamor for his blood.