I was driving home today from some must-do shopping (not the fun kind), but my mind wasn't on the groceries or the car. Mom had called and left a message that my dad's headstone was finally set on the grave. Not exactly uplifting, but God uses even the grim.
By no coincidence, God has been speaking to my heart about duplicity (the last blog) and that wholehearted commitment means death to self. And then the image of my father came back to me. I have no idea what was going through my dad's mind that last week of his life; most of his life I didn't really know what he was thinking. But I saw him fighting against death. In the last 3 days, we were certain that God was taking him. But I'm not sure that my dad wanted to go. He fought death with every ounce of energy he had left. Why? Not because he wasn't a christian. He was. I think it's because he felt closer to his family in those last few days than he had in his entire life - and he didn't want to lose that. His wife and children urged him to rest and let go with joy, reminding him of what was ahead. I think the present overwhelmed him. He was being loved and loving us and, yes, probably afraid. God's will is daunting sometimes.
And so here I sit, thinking this through, praying this through. God brought that image to my mind and then said, "Daughter, you are doing the same thing. You fight against dying to self. You love yourself. You love the status quo. You fear what you don't know. Your death is gain so stop fighting it."
Not surprisingly, when I came home, Thomas Chalmers in his paper "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection"wrote this directly to me: "To estimate the magnitude and the difficulty of such a surrender, let us only think that it were just as arduous to prevail on him not to love wealth, which is but one of the things in the world, as to prevail on him to set willful fire to his own property. This he might do with sore and painful reluctance, if he saw that the salvation of his life hung upon it. But this he would do willingly if he saw that a new property of tenfold value was instantly to emerge from the wreck of the old one. In this case there is something more than the mere displacement of an affection. There is the overbearing of one affection by another. But to desolate his heart of all love for the things of the world without the substitution of any love in its place, were to him a process of as unnatural violence as to destroy all the things he has in the world, and give him nothing in their room. So if to love not the world be indispensable to one's Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old man is not too strong a term to mark that transition in his history, when all old things are done away, and all things are become new." In other words - I need a vision of Christ's worth over what I have now. It's the great exchange. My death to self for His life in me. God's getting the short end of the stick on this one.
When is the gravestone going to finally be set?
No comments:
Post a Comment