One of the pictures in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is of a man bending double from his waist, sorting through a can of garbage, carefully extracting the little bits of tinsel he finds there. Behind him is standing an angel who is offering him a solid gold crown studded with precious jewels, but the man is so engrossed in the garbage he never notices the angel.
When we get to heaven, will you and I be ashamed of our preoccupation with “garbage” in this life – garbage that prevented us from dying to our desire for it, turning around, leaving it all behind, and reaching out for what God wanted to give us? Why is it that we seem to cling so tightly to what we want, and in the process lose what God wants us to have? God wants us to have power and blessing and glory. But you don’t obtain it by adding Jesus to your life-He has to be your life!
Imagine what it would have been like to be Simon, and to have carried the Cross of Christ while following Him up Calvary.
What would it have been like to have shared in the humiliation of rejection as He was cast out of the city?
What would it have been like to have felt the sticky warmth of His blood from the Cross on your skin?
What would it have been like to have felt the encroaching horror as the place of execution neared?
What would it have been like to have looked up through the sweat that trickled down your face, and seen the executioners who stood waiting impassively with hammers in hand?
What would it have been like to have the burden of the Cross lifted from your back as someone said, “This is His Cross; you’re free to go now,” and He was nailed to it, not you?
Within moments of betraying Jesus, Judas hated himself for what he had done. Jesus’ third religious trial was interrupted briefly by a commotion at the doorway as Judas burst onto the scene. With a face that was surely contorted by the wretchedness of conviction, he flung thirty pieces of silver across the temple floor. As the room suddenly grew silent, the clattering coins must have reverberated in the stillness as they skidded and skipped across the marble surface. Thirty pieces of silver! The price that had been paid him by the chief priests for his betrayal! Thirty pieces of silver! The price of a wounded slave! (see Ex. 21:32) Judas sold his Lord for the price of something that, in his culture, was good for nothing!
You and I betray Jesus when we call ourselves Christians yet give our hearts to money, or material things, or selfish pursuits, or anyone or anything other than Him. We betray Him when we spend more time on the Internet than in prayer. We betray Him when we spend more time reading the morning newspaper than reading the Bible. Would you confess and repent of your sin of betrayal, ask God to cleanse you, and commit to living a life of love and loyalty to Jesus?
The changes brought about by God’s Word in your life and mine are not primarily for the purpose of making us good or successful or happy or wealthy or prosperous or problem free. The primary purpose of these changes is that we might know God fully and intimately so we can reflect Him in all we are and say and do, bringing glory to the One Who created us.
Is your life complete? Do you feel you are waiting for something, but you don’t know what? Do you have an aching loneliness, a hunger pain of the spirit, a yearning deep inside yourself for something? For Someone? Then get in touch with your Creator. You are hungry for God. You were created with a capacity to know Him in a personal, permanent, love relationship. That capacity is empty until you establish the relationship with Him for which you were created.
I was a state witness to the execution of Velma Barfield, the first woman to be executed in the United States in more than twenty-two years. I had developed a friendship with her about six months prior to her execution as a result of her correspondence with my mother and had grown to love her as a sister in Christ. Following the execution, a newspaper reporter called me, probing my reaction. “Anne, how are you going to get back at the state? Aren’t you bitter?” I knew I had the opportunity to allow the grief over my friend’s death to go a step further and become a grievance that would become bitterness.
By God’s grace, I chose to take my reaction to the cross of Christ. In prayer, I had to “crucify” the anger and bitterness I felt was justified, leaving it with the One Who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay” (Rom. 12:19, NIV). I laid my grievances at the nail-pierced feet of One Who understands firsthand what it feels like to be deeply wounded by the sin of other people. Would you do the same?
