There’s only one sin that will kill us, and that’s the sin we refuse to repent of and seek God’s forgiveness for. If we end up being lost eternally, it won’t be because we made mistakes along the way — it’ll be because we persisted in our mistakes.
When we find ourselves checkmated by God, we should be thankful. By all rights, He should have given up on us long ago, but in His grace He has not yet done so. We should respond rightly, in word and deed, to the fact that God has blocked our path.
If our Lord chose the concept of crucifixion to describe the removal of sin from our lives, we ought not to expect that process to be entirely pleasant. The destruction of our habits requires nothing less than the dying of the person we used to be.
One encouraging thing to keep in mind is that each positive choice creates momentum and strength. If we choose in the present moment to do what is right, we’ll find the next moment much easier to deal with. Every good decision leads to another.
Contentment and desire are not contradictory. We can long for God with a joy that’s as deep as our longing. We can reach forward eagerly but also gratefully. So we need to long for God fervently, yet with a joy that is real right now.
To be without God in the world is a nightmare of loneliness to any honest person. But to be without Him in the next will be worse — worse than any earthly nightmare can know. “No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God” (Richter).
God doesn’t answer all our questions, and it’s often frightening to be without information that we think we need. Yet if we trust God, we’ll do this. When we don’t have all the information we want, we must be content to have Him, our only true need.
Compared to our eternal hope, pain can be seen as a temporary problem. At present, we’re still in the temporary part of God’s scheme of redemption. But the eternal part is coming, and that’s where our hearts and minds need to be fixed.
Jesus did not experience the negative, corrosive emotions that normally make pain so horrible for us. Much of our suffering comes from anger, resentment, and self-pity. But Jesus refused to respond to pain in these ways; so His pain was much purer.
It’s not a burden but a privilege to be such creatures as we are: human beings. We should accept the honor that God has bestowed upon us. Our God-given endowments are wonderful; we should be grateful for them and use them to the praise of His glory.
