Embraced By Grace

Platitudes and I don't get along too well.  There is no place in faith for empty comments, trivia, clichés, banality.  Life is too real, the consequences too serious, the battle too intense, and the implications too eternal, to major on minors or to reduce God down to bumper sticker theology. 

In this very real and troubled world we find ourselves enveloped in harsh realities of a thousand kinds.  Followers of Christ are not exempt.  There are forces at work ranging from tribulation to distress to persecution to famine to nakedness to peril and to sword (see Roman 8:35). If you have not made peace with this yet, do it soon.

Make peace with something else, also.  In the mist of all these dangers, in Christ "we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us" (Rom. 8:37).  Our lives are embraced by grace and in the magnificent power of God there is nothing, in and of itself, that can take us down -- "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing" (Rom. 8:38-39). 

Is this a too reckless optimism?  I think not.  When Jesus was raised up from the dead He set into motion a reality that trumps every other reality.  The image of a resurrected Lord is stamped onto every event life might throw at us.  Even death itself is not longer the enemy that does us in.  Jesus is so much Lord that He said, "He who believes in Me will live even if he dies" (John 11:25). 

None of us is going to get out of this physical world alive.  None of us have to see tragedy and death as the final statement about our lives.  The free grace of God is extended and every one of us is invited into fellowship with God, a fellowship that ultimately and finally is stamped in a victory won for all eternity.

PS:  To read the entire Romans 8:31-39 passage click here.