Well into my seventies now, I am reminded of God’s wonderful grace to my life. I am a very ordinary man filled with an extraordinary God, the Living God, who has come to all of us in the person of Jesus.
This last decade has been difficult for me, with two bouts of cancer, radiation (which has destroyed my salivary glands) and chemo-therapy treatments, the removal of a large portion of the roof of my mouth, the removal of most of the teeth in my mouth (making it incredibly difficult to eat), arthritis in both shoulders and my lower back, and an aggressive development of peripheral neuropathy in both feet and legs. Physically, I am a mess.
All of these issues have attacked my energy and stamina. In it all, however, I have come face to face with the grace of God in the person of Jesus. His strength is my strength, and I am filled with a peace that envelops me daily.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not thrilled about my health status. This is not what I am saying at all. I am saying, however, that God’s grace in me is shaping how I take what has been given to me, and is allowing it all to be taken up within the embrace of grace. The pain and discomfort are real, but they are taken not as an end but, rather, as an open door to what God is doing at this late date in my life.
I am not abandoned. I am not discarded. I am not rejected. I am received. I am embraced. I matter in God’s scheme of things.
The cross has taken my story and swept it up into the story of Jesus. Jesus said, “Come to me.” I come, I keep coming, and Jesus keeps giving me His rest. I rest in His rest. I have peace in His peace. I have joy in His joy. By His stripes I am healed, and in Him, regardless of the status of my body, I am whole.
May I take this a step or two further? For the past decade life has thrown a lot of pain, frustrations and stress at me. Yet, God has been greater than anything life has spoken into my life.
The Bible convinces me that God’s Yes is greater than any no life might speak. The Yes of God is a Sovereign, holy, and all-powerful Yes, rooted in His sacrificial self-giving in Jesus, a self-giving that required the power of God to raise Jesus from the dead. God is not a reluctant tyrant demanding His pound of flesh but who, if we plead hard enough will relent and give grace. God takes the initiative. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This is not reluctance. This is grace; unmerited, lavished, and life transforming grace.
It is a remarkable reality to live within the grace of God’s Sovereign Yes. When Paul used this word Yes, he spoke of God’s heart behind the grace. In Romans 8:31, Paul speaks of how God is for His people, and says, “If God is for us, who is against us?” It is absolutely amazing to know that “God is for us.” To know this is to change the trajectory of one’s life. It simply changes everything.
The God who raised Jesus from the dead stands with His people. When Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit He spoke of how He comes alongside His people. He comes into their story, not to condemn (see Rom. 8:1) but to embrace. This is the way of God. His word to us is Yes, an ultimate Yes, that, when received, stamps our lives with the resurrection of power of God to embrace our lives and to live in the victory provided by Jesus is His life, death, and resurrection.
Almost daily, I am tempted away from this way of being. Pressures, health, decisions, complications, pain, life. These all have a way about them of coming between the Savior and me. I am so very grateful, however, that the Savior’s Yes in me is simply too strong to allow things to take me down. St Paul’s question daily comes back to me, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Romans 8:35). Then He answers his own question with God’s overwhelming and Sovereign Yes in Jesus,
In all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)
You and I are not made for defeat. We are made for victory in the victory that is Jesus. In John 16:33 Jesus says, “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” So, His word is “take courage.” Take courage in his overcoming. Take courage in His victory. Take courage in His life.
In Jesus God is saying one huge, dynamic, and Sovereign Yes, and this Yes is our Immanuel - God with us. May God help you and me to take His lavished grace, and live within the embrace of God, “who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us” (Ephesians 3:20).
