This topic does not go over well with mainstream Christians today (and close your eyes, because I’m going to use the “S” word – “suffering”) but I’ve learned that to be completely and utterly annihilated by God is good.
It’s painful to feel so wretched when we suffer, but it’s where we need to be because it causes us to lose all hope in ourselves and to look to Christ – and Him only. The real Christian life is a very painful process to go through – just read the Psalms… read Job… read about Joseph who was promised great things by God Himself, only to find himself in a filthy, rat-infested prison for years before God crushed Joseph’s will so that he would be completely obedient to Him and for great and wonderful things… read Daniel… and more than this, read about Christ Himself, who humiliated Himself to walk among men for a short while – just to be crucified in the worst possible capital punishment ever known in the history of men – so that you and I could be free from the law of sin, and open to the law of His righteousness. (Refer to Romans 7 and 8).
When we’re failing, we are winning – we must lay hold of this because we are indeed, nothing, and He is our all in all. We are Christ’s bride. What husband does not love and fight and protect His bride! Christ, and the husband to the Church waited and waited through the old testament scriptures until He could be reunited with her (the second Eve) and now he is.
Without the old testament, you cannot understand Christ. There needs to be this connectedness in preaching, in our prayers and in our meditation. With Christ, here is Somebody who is telling me the truth! Those who resist him are the ones who lose, so why bother resist, and not submit? Nothing can separate us from Christ – even the unbearable pains of death, but don’t sweat it… God is with us as much as He was with His Own Son when he went through it, and not one hair was lost.
For me, I think that if I were the least in God’s Kingdom, I wouldn’t even notice…
Brett Gordon 8/2016