octolilly [through the years]

It is sobering to see the popular trend of Jesus as a really cool guy we worship. He’s my Co-Pilot and I even wear a bright pink bracelet with WWJD written on it to remind me of what would Jesus do in each situation. I’m cool, hip, and so in love with Him, yo. And I wear my DOG-tag (depend on God) as well. My PUSH (pray until something happens) T-shirt is proudly worn and I sing about Him like He’s my boyfriend. And we slowly lose the awe for Jesus Christ. He simply becomes an especially trendy Lord. 



He is so much more. He took the way of the cross.

“Today’s executions are swift and even somewhat merciful: the sudden snap of a spine, the flash of electricity through a body, the gradual sleep brought on by noxious gas, the quiet, swift death of a lethal injection. Crucifixion was designed to be an excruciatingly painful, humiliating, lingering death. Merrill F. Unger, the late biblical scholar, states that ‘instances are on record of persons surviving for nine days’ on the cross. 



Today the cross is an object of veneration. Designed into exquisite jewelry and artistic statuary, the cross has become a thing of beauty. The outline of the cross is set into mosaic tiles and highlighted with indirect lighting, framed in metal and etched in lovely, mood-setting stained glass. People of the first century would be shocked to see our modern treatment of what was, to them, an object of brutality and the cruelest kind of death. It would be comparable to our wearing the image of a hangman’s noose on our lapel or framing an artist’s rendering of an electric chair on our living room wall. In the first century the cross meant death…but not just any death. It meant the most hideous, anguished death imaginable.”



- Max Lucado, The Darkness and the Dawn



What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered
Was all for sinners’ gain;

Mine, mine was the transgression,
But Thine the deadly pain.

Lo, here I fall, my Savior!
‘Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor,

Vouchsafe to me Thy grace.



What language shall I borrow

To thank Thee, dearest friend,

For this Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever;

And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never

Outlive my love to Thee.



– Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century monk

The Not-so-serious:



My Pastor is quite humorous at times. He’s in his early 30’s and tends to add sarcasm to most of his average conversation. Tonight he began cracking jokes about a memo sent around telling the ushers what to wear tonight. All of the ushers except one had on a black suit and red tie…and so did my Pastor. He began teasing the one who had a gray sport coat on…but it was all in good fun. There really was no memo – just coincidence. The funny part is that a little boy just died laughing when he made those comments and began giggling uncontrollably. I thought I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing. Pastor was about to pray over the offering and we were all snickering because of the little boy. Ahh, what would church be without all of the little ones? 



The Serious:



Psalm 119:121-128, 136

Open my soul to see,
I love not thee above all.

For riches and pleasures

Mean more than your letters,

My heart into sin has fall’n.

Open my soul and be,

The One who breaks down the fears,
For your joy and your peace,

Do mean more than these things,

I cleave to Thy word in tears.

Is anything too hard for God? Who’s got a problem beyond His power to solve? Are there situations He’s not the master of? Is anything too hard for God?

“Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27)

“And so Screwtape reveals the enemy’s ploy- first make humans flabby, with small passions and desires, then offer a sop to those diminished passions so that their experience is one of contentment. They know nothing of great joy or great sorrow. They are merely nice.

Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice. We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don’t offend anyone. Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether? As C.S. Lewis said, ‘We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.’

The greatest enemy of holiness is not passion; it is apathy. Look at Jesus. He was no milksop. His life was charged with passion. After he drove the crooks from the temple, ‘his disciples remembered that it was written, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’ (John 2:17). This isn’t quite the pictures we have in Sunday school, Jesus with a lamb and a child or two, looking for all the world like Mr. Rogers with a beard. The world’s nicest guy. He was something far more powerful. He was holy. G.K. Chesterton wrote,

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with His hair parted in the middle or His hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild scenery of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who acted like an angry god- and always like a god…The diction used about Christ has always been…sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurdled into the sea. (Orthodoxy)

If the way to avoid the murderous rage and deceptive allures of desire is to kill it, if deadness is next to godliness, then Jesus had to be the deadest person ever. But he is called the living God. ‘It is a fearful thing,’ the writer of Hebrews says, ‘to fall into the hands of the living God…For our God is a consuming fire’ (Heb. 10:31; 12:29). And what is this consuming fire? His jealous love (Deut. 4:24). God is a deeply, profoundly passionate person. Zeal consumes him. It is the secret of his life, the writer of Hebrews says. The ‘joy set before him’ enabled Jesus to endure the agony of the Cross (Heb. 12:2). In other words, his profound desire for something greater sustained him at the moment of his deepest trial. We cannot hope to live like him without a similar depth of passion. Many people find that the dilemma of desire is too much to live with, and so they abandon, they disown their desire. This is certainly true of a majority of Christians at present. Somehow we believe that we can get on without it. We are mistaken.”

– The Journey of Desire, John Eldredge