WHEN LIFE GETS MESSY

For years we had this poster hanging in our kitchen.  My wife Dianne had retrieved it from her younger brother Sam.  On a whim we hung it next to our kitchen table.  It stayed there a long time.

I really identify with the little guy in the photo. (In fact, if you compare this photo to one of my baby pictures, the resemblance almost appears genetically ordained.) Someone once said, "Life is tough and then you die."  At times this life would be an argument for staying out of hell come eternity. This life is difficult enough.

Life gets messy.  That's a given living in a fallen world. G.K. Chesterton once spoke of God's "terrible gift of freedom."  Because God has chosen to give humankind the freedom to choose to live in a right relationship with Him and experience the blessing, or choose to be our own god and experience the consequences; that collision of sinful choices has collateral damage on believers and  unbelievers alike.  God has delivered us from the penalty of sin and enabled us with the power to overcome sin, but we still live in the presence of sin until Christ returns to establish the Kingdom in its fullness.

Life gets messy -- and will get messier until this fallen world is redeemed.

In the time until that occurs, it does me little good to constantly lament the suffering and the frustration of living for God in a world that still wants to keep Him out of sight, out of mind, and out of work.  That just makes me a whining prophet.  What I need to do is to face the presence of sin with the promise of God. 

That promise is best summarized by the apostle Paul, writing to the Church of God at Rome, which knew what it was to live in the messy, destructive presence of sin.

"If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?  Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.  Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died--more than that, who was raised to life--is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?  As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,  neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Romans 8:31-39 New International Version.

(c) 2010 by Stephen L Dunn