Christ, Who is Our Life

April, 2011


"Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When He had heard THEREFORE that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was." (John 11:5-6)

BECAUSE Jesus loved them, he waited....He waited until Lararus died and there was no more earthly hope for him. He waited so that those He loved could see and be satisfied with His glory, revealed in resurrection power, so that they would believe that He is Lord - even over death.

We might think that it would have been more loving for Jesus to have gone to them before Lazarus died, so that his friends would not have to suffer. But divine love reaches beyond human understanding...He enters our weaknesses and suffers with us ("Jesus wept." - vs. 35), but loves us too much to merely relieve our pain. There is something more important than physical life, more important than earthly comfort and ease, more important than what we can see with the eye of reason....

What we truly need is not satisfied by what we think....Jesus, Himself, is the eternal embodiment of the life we need every moment of every day and until we embrace Him in our distress, we will continue to cleave to (idolatrous) replacements that will leave us unsteady and insecure. He is our Consolation, for He, unlike men, can reach the deep recesses of the human heart to reveal Himself as our heavenly balm. His love has undertaken our deliverance from death to life and will continue to uphold us through every weakness, every sorrow, every trial. No one else can do that. Our needs are ever satisfied by the glory and grace of Who He is....

Why then do we confine His love to what can only gratify immediate, temporal pleasure? Why do we labor and toil for "the meat that perishes" when there is "meat that endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give you?" (John 6:27) Is the Lord of Glory to be merely crowned as an accessory to a life that we are making for ourselves, or is He where we find our life? (Col. 3:4, Matt. 10:39)

....Oh that He would take our weak arms and bear them up to cleave unto Him, to lay hold of His yoke and learn of Him, to lay our weary heads upon Him and rest, to be strengthened with His might as He carries us along...


"Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; THAT THEY MAY BEHOLD MY GLORY, which thou hast given me..." (John 17:24)