8-15-2023

Good Morning All,

           1 Corinthians 1:18; “The message about the cross is nonsense to those who are being destroyed, but it is God’s power to us who are being saved.”

     Do you ever fall for those jokes that have an obvious answer, but you miss them?  For example, if an airplane crashes exactly on the border between the United States and Mexico, exactly dead center on the border line, where do you bury the survivors? (You don’t bury survivors!) Or if an EEG is an electroencephalogram and an EKG is an electrocardiogram, then what is an EGG? (Breakfast!)

   These kinds of jokes are infuriating because they are really simple if you pay attention.  Yet we don’t pay as close attention as we should, so it slips by us. It is so obvious that we miss it.  Even when we see how ridiculously obvious the answer it, we feel it is almost nonsense.  Something so simple that when you overthink it, you miss it.

     God does the same thing with faith.  God took the most heinous symbol of torture and punishment, the cross, and made it the symbol of hope.  Then he took that hope and gave it to us as a gift.  Then he entrusted the delivery of this message of hope to you and to me.  Talk about a plan that is as foolish as it gets, this isn’t a business plan to take to your bank for a loan on!  But that is the point; there is no humanly way that this will work.  This plan requires that you and I trust God fully to work.

     That is why God does it this way.  There is absolutely no doubt that for this plan to work God has to make it work.  We are only the conduit that He chooses to use to make it work.  That is the beauty of God’s plan; it doesn’t rely on us.  Nothing we do makes our salvation work, only God makes it work.

     The beauty of this is that we don’t have to look at our life and try to make it so that we are earning brownie points with God.  God loves us as we are, warts and all.  There is no sin that we committed that God has not or will not forgive.  God’s grace outweighs our sin!  His amazing love moves everything for us to be his child.  His plan is simple enough that it won’t fail us.  All we do is cling to his promise.  All we do is hold on tight.  No amount of works on our part matters.  So, we can never be beyond help.  We are never so bad that things are hopeless; we always have hope because everything depends on God and not on us.  His promise, as simple as it is, is all we need.

Gracious Father, in you we have hope, in you we have salvation.  You make it simple so that we may receive from you our promise of eternal life.  Give us the courage to trust and the strength to hold onto your promise.  Move in our lives that we may come to those who are hurting and in need of your grace especially at this time.  Use us to bring your kingdom to those who are desperate and in pain.  In Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret