- Details
- Written by: Don Goulding
Are God's consolations not enough for you, words spoken gently to you? (Job 15:11) (NIV)
A forty-something woman came trembling after I preached in Pakistan. “I had a daughter fourteen years ago, but never any boy. I am useless.” Tears streamed down her coffee-toned cheeks from under her pink shawl.
Pakistani culture dictated that she produce a male heir for her family. The poor soul had convinced herself that some great curse was on her. Her body convulsed as she pressed her palms together and begged for prayer to conceive a boy.
As I sought help from the Holy Spirit, I found myself in a difficult position. This dear sister needed to let go of her obsession with a boy and find fulfillment in Jesus. I passed a note in Urdu with the verse from Job about God’s consultations. It was a hard message, but the condition of that precious woman’s heart was more important than the fruit of her womb.
I am often a sharp knife when ministering God’s truth to others and a dull mallet when applying it to my faults. After we helped the Pakistani, Jesus worked on my heart.
“Is my love enough to make you let go of lesser blessings?”
I held secret dissatisfaction with certain cards life had dealt me. By my attitude, I had said to the lover of my soul that I wanted, that I deserved, more than him. I wanted Jesus plus an easy life, Jesus with a bit of popularity, Jesus and some fun mixed in. The consolations of Christ had not been enough for me.
I sorely needed to listen to my preaching because the condition of my heart is more important than the fruit of the world.
Prayer: Lord, I have been a fool with your love. It is enough.
- Details
- Written by: Don Goulding
And he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised. (2 Corinthians 5:15)
For centuries, the love of Romeo and Juliet has been celebrated because tragic love is the most profound.
The families of the lovestruck couple were feuding, so they married secretly. Then Juliet’s father engaged her to a self-absorbed count. In response, she swallowed a drug to simulate death. Her plan was to be entombed and later rise to escape with Romeo, but he found her comatose and assumed she was dead, so he poisoned himself. When Juliet awoke and discovered the truth, she stabbed herself to join Romeo in death.
The story of John meeting Jane in high school, marrying, having 2.5 healthy children, and living happily ever after doesn’t engage our hearts because it’s unchallenged love. Jesus’s love for me is not John and Jane’s love but Romeo and Juliet’s love. It’s tragic love.
Jesus said, “I will die so we can be together.” He knowingly left perfection to enter a hateful world that murdered him. The intensity of his love compelled him into this most epic tragedy in history.
Like Juliet, it’s now my turn to die for Jesus. But this plot has a twist. Though Christ died, he arose again, and his Spirit returned to live in me, his lover. As I die to myself, the life of my true love lives on in my body. In new ways every day, I reciprocate the death of him who is my passion. It’s the love saga of ultimate sacrifice and perfect union. Our mutually tragic love will be celebrated throughout eternal history.
Prayer: Yes, Great Love, we willingly die for each other.
- Details
- Written by: Don Goulding
He gave them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest garden plant and becomes a tree, so that the wild birds come and nest in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31, 32)
It began when I was a boy and realized I had sinned. I needed the forgiveness offered through Jesus. I was baptized at eleven, and the seed of eternity was planted in my heart.
As the years passed, I came to know God’s Son as more than my savior.
Now, Jesus is the mortar that holds every brick of my life together. He is the remedy for my raging dysfunction and the doctor who sets my dislocated life back in place. He is far more than the sum of everything in the universe.
The Spirit of Jesus is the music that transforms my spastic twitching into dance. He rains on my Martian landscape, changing it into a teeming Serengeti. When health fails or friends abandon, Jesus is the sunshine that fills the icy crevasse. He is my freedom, my peace, and my only hope.
Imagine the vacuum of outer space. You try to draw a panicked breath, but there’s no air to inhale. There is nothing but reflexive gulps at emptiness. That’s what it’s like to live without Jesus.
If Jesus is removed from the equation, life ceases to exist—it becomes merely a shell, like a clam without its creature or a cocoon vacant of its butterfly. There is no life, only a void of darkness with fading memories of the concept of light.
Though my faith in Jesus began as a tiny seed, it has grown into an unmovable tree of many years. Still, my branches strain toward him. They cannot turn away until I have joined with my everything.
Prayer: Jesus, I want you more than life.