Monday, May 27, 2019
654 - What Jesus Did
Spirituality Column #654
May 28, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
What Jesus Did
By Bob Walters
“You will grieve, but
your grief will turn to joy.” – Jesus to the disciples, John 16:20
Most of the trick of being a joyful
Christian is in trusting, rather than second-guessing, God’s righteousness.
Don’t we
love to tell God who He ought to be, what He ought to do, whom He ought to help
or harm, and when He ought to do it … usually, “Right now”? In church we make a big deal about
“forgiveness,” but live-fire prayer out in the fallen world often amounts to,
“God, fix this now! We’ll discuss sin
later.”
In these
modern times we have the benefit of knowing the “whole story,” at least, as
much of it as God lets on in the Bible. We
have two millennia of the truth of Christ being told, retold, studied,
preached, and put into action. But the
majority of the world still doesn’t “get” the Word, whether they’ve heard it or
not.
Here in America, God’s Word is
actively, aggressively, and angrily being pushed out of government, civil
society, and civil discourse daily. Can
you imagine how surprised certain people will be when they discover that the unique
and trusting “civility” our republic traditionally enjoys is a function of
Christian truth and righteousness, not social science and “woke” social fashion?
It’s not like we haven’t been
instructed. No wonder Godly joy is so
rare.
But I digress. Over the last 300-or-so years intellectuals –
first with the Enlightenment and then with Darwinism and then with Technology –
have given truth a proudly-human secular makeover while generally scoffing at
God’s righteousness. Churches often
counter the empirical world’s cock-sureness by preaching sin and forgiveness,
controlling their flocks with the behavioral levers of guilt, shame, and fear.
I prefer – and much recommend – the
love, grace, and freedom-in-Christ model in which the joy of knowing Jesus
changes our hearts. We desire relationship
with God and trust His – not our – righteousness infinitely and eternally. Joy feeds on joy.
As we read Jesus’s words to the
disciples in John 16 (above) the night before His crucifixion, He told them of hatred,
grief, suffering, persecution, and disenfranchisement they would surely endure,
but that their “joy will be made
complete.” That could not possibly have
made any sense to them, just like it doesn’t make sense to much of the world
today. God plays the endgame, and we all
should know better than to doubt.
The difference, of course, is that the
disciples already knew and trusted Yahweh, the righteous God of the
Hebrews. Today much of the world thinks they/we
are God.
Slowly, the disciples caught on to Who
this divine Jesus was. The gifts of God promised
through Christ were His own resurrection, their salvation, the comfort and
peace of the Holy Spirit, eternal life in heaven, their restoration and rebirth
in God’s glory, forgiveness and justification before God, and being called
heirs in the Kingdom of God. They hadn’t
seen it, couldn’t fathom it, and even Jesus couldn’t explain it. All He could say was – and it was a promise –
“Your grief will turn to joy.”
Joy resides not in second-guessing
God or even in knowledge of the Bible, but in trusting God’s
righteousness. Live in that trust and
you’ll find that your joy is complete.
To paraphrase the old WWJD wristbands,
that is what Jesus did.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) figures “happy” is a symptom but “joy” is
a condition.