Don’t Be Mum!

 Some people lack motivation. Robert H. Hutchins said, “Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.” Jo Brand said, “My favorite machine at the gym is the vending machine.” Bill Vaughn said, “As a nation we are dedicated to keeping physically fit — and to parking as close to the stadium as we can.” One anonymous wag asked, “How do you get a man to do sit-ups? Put the remote between his toes” (maybe a frustrated wife said that?!).

The apostle Paul was a highly motivated individual. Even before coming to Christ, he lived a life of full dedication to God’s service, as he (mis)understood it. Although he once opposed and persecuted Christ and Christians, he describes himself to a mob of Jewish people in Jerusalem (that shortly before had attempted to kill him) by saying in Acts 22:3, “I am indeed a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, and brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught according to the strictness of our fathers’ law, and was zealous toward God as you all are today.” He goes on to testify in verse 4 that before coming to Christ, “I persecuted this Way, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women.” Paul was never half-hearted in his service to God, even when misguided. Later, after believing and obeying Christ’s gospel (Acts 22:16), Paul (in prison at the time for preaching Christ – Philippians 1:12-18) wrote to Christians at Philippi, “But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ” (3:7-8). After being commissioned by Christ to preach the gospel, Paul testified to King Agrippa in Acts 26:22-23, “Therefore, having obtained help from God, to this day I stand, witnessing to small and great, saying no other things than those which Moses and the prophets said would come — that the Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead, and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.” And so it was — when it came to preaching Christ and talking to people about Jesus, the apostle Paul didn’t have an “off” button! According to strong church tradition, those who opposed the gospel finally shut his mouth when they cut his head off outside Rome sometime around
68 A. D.

What motivated Paul to tell the story of Jesus? What moved him and sustained him even though doing so often cost him comfort and caused him pain and even prison? Why wouldn’t he stay mum or be a “silent saint” like so many who sit on church pews today? Why was he so bent on preaching Christ? In 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 he writes about the force that compelled him to live for and tell about Jesus: “For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He      died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.” Paul was so gripped by the love Christ had for him that he couldn’t help loving Christ and talking about Him! What do you love to talk about most? Grandchildren? Football or other sports? Politics? Fishing and hunting? Clothes? Computers? Christians ought to talk about Christ! No power on earth can open our mouths for Christ like being gripped by His love. Are you gripped by Jesus’ love for       you? Do you love Him? How long has it been since you talked about Him to someone else? Just asking. 

  Dan Gulley, Smithville TN 

No Stranger To Our Pain!

A little story reminds us pain is a perennial human problem. A man went to a fortune teller. She looked into her fortune-ball and told him you will have lots of pain in your life for the next 8 years.” The man asked hopefully, “Then what?” She said, “Then you’ll get used to it.” Sooner or later pain comes to every life – but we never get used to it. Country artist Keith Whitley captured the painful truth about pain in his 1989 song, “I’m No Stranger To the Rain.” The song describes various kinds of suffering and the foggy, hopeless feeling chronic pain can cause. Whitley, a brilliant young country artist, was telling the truth about himself in that song. He struggled with alcoholism from a young age and died of alcoholic poisoning in May 1989, at 33 years old.                                 

 Let’s shift from a country music singer to Christ the Savior. To put a little twist on the title of Whitley’s song, Jesus was no stranger to our pain. Centuries before Christ came to earth, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “He was despised and rejected by men; A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” Isaiah 53:3a). Jesus was no stranger to life’s pain. His pain began with birth in a stable (Luke 2:7) and built to an excruciating climax 33 years later on a cross. Matt.27:35, says tersely, “They crucified Him,” but death by crucifixion was a death of unimaginable pain. On the cross, as physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pain saturated His body and soul, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani; That is, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt.27:46). No theological attempt to explain that heartbroken cry fully suffices. The sight of God in the flesh suffering, on a cross of all things, confronts us with depths of spiritual mystery we simply cannot fully plumb.

 Still, there is a truth here that can help us when we, like Jesus, hurt until we question whether or not God is still with us and still cares for us. The pain Jesus suffers on the cross provides the most powerful proof available God has not forsaken us or stopped caring! He has on the job experience at intense and sustained suffering! Philip Yancey writes, “No other religion – not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism or Islam – offers the unique contribution of an all-powerful God who willingly takes on the          limitations and suffering of His creation. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, ‘For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His own creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair ... He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain  and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile’ ” (Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?, p 225). All this adds a new layer on the theological question, if God is all powerful and all good, why do good people suffer? We may never totally understand why — but if the question is will God Himself suffer, the answer thunders down the ages from the cross — yes, in the worst kind of way. If God had to      suffer to save us, who could imagine we, too, would never have to do some suffering? Just asking.

 For Christ suffered for sins once ... that He might bring us to God”  – 1 Peter 3:18 

Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN