Monday Needs Good News
My momma says it’s like the weeks after Christmas, when all the hoopla is over and you feel the letdown. For two weeks I have had this feeling, along with trouble getting out of bed and working up the fortitude to get dressed and keep moving.
When we feel low, the temptation is to curl up in a ball somewhere, but as followers of Christ we are required to work when we are depressed, to pray and read the Bible and seek God.
So I did the work. And now I must tell you the happy ending.
Today my step is once again light, and I declare that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
From every direction last week God spoke to me of the gospel of Christ. In my Bible reading, in my reading of other literature, in sermons I listened to, and in song God clearly said, What you need is the power of the cross.
The gospel seems rudimentary, and so we tend to receive it, feel that we have graduated from it, and can move on to “greater” truths, but this is wrong.
Elisabeth Elliot writes, in Keep a Quiet Heart, “In difficulties of all kinds I’ve been wonderfully helped by taking time to look at them in the light of Christ Himself. Do you know the hymn, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus”? (If not, you’d find it a great comfort to learn it by heart.) That is where we must take our stand. It was at the cross that Jesus dealt with all our sins, griefs, and sorrows. He calls us to give up all right to ourselves, take up the cross, and follow. This hard place in which you perhaps find yourself, so painful and bewildering, is the very place in which God is giving you the opportunity to look only to Him, to travail in prayer, and to learn long-suffering, gentleness, meekness –in short, to learn the depths of love that Christ Himself has poured out on all of us.”
Do you know what my one task was this weekend at church?
To go early and prepare the Lord’s Supper.
In the quiet of the church kitchen, I held the bread in my hand –the Savior standing behind me saying, I know what it means to feel pain. (Sweet comfort!)
One at a time I placed each piece of bread in the tray. 100-some pieces of bread for 100-some sinners who would come to church that night.
I held my empty cup -the cup Christ chose to fill with His own blood, to bring me hope and a future. Remember, this is my blood poured out for the forgiveness of your sins.
One cup at a time I filled the silver trays. 100-some cups for 100-some sinners.
You tell me –how is it that a woman who has walked with God these thirty-six years needs to have the good news preached to her? Why do I need to hear again that I am a sinner, and I have no power to pull myself up out of the pit of despair –that only Christ can do this?
On a Monday morning, then, when we feel the weight of current difficulties and the inevitable trials of a new week coming, what we need most is the good news of Christ. Jesus loves us. He died to take the punishment for our sins, and by the power of God he was raised back to life. So we can live in that power, too -really live.
Happily ever after.