mountain

Down from the Mountain

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“You see, all have sinned, and all their futile attempts to reach God in His glory fail. Yet they are now saved and set right by His free gift of grace through the redemption available only in Jesus the Anointed” (Romans 3:23-24, VOICE).

So many see Christianity as another option, just one road among the many that lead up the mountain to God. They say that all paths get to the destination but in different ways.

How about this? There may be several roads that lead up that mountain, but none of us will get to God that way. None of us are strong enough or brave enough or stedfast enough to make it all the way up.

How about this? God didn’t wait patiently for someone to find a way up to Him. He came down from the mountain to us to help us get to Him. He didn’t merely show the way or even offer to walk before us up the path. He became the way.

Jesus is our way up the mountain. Not by chanting and meditation. Not by praying five times a day. Not by sin management and moralism. Not by keeping a set of rule. Not by any amount of sacrifices or religious rites.

How then?

By simply believing that Jesus is Who He says He is and He did what He set out to do. It’s by trusting that Jesus took on our imperfections and sins and failures and death, instead giving us perfection and righteousness and new life.

If it had been up to me and my own efforts, I’d still be at the foot of the mountain looking up in despair. But thanks to God, I’m on my way up and guaranteed to reach the top. And my victory song will be that Jesus led me all the way there.

Thag You Very Buch Again

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 3 Comments

hobbit-desolation-of-smaug-bilbo-martin-freeman

“Thorin looked and walked as if his kingdom was already regained and Smaug chopped up into little pieces. Then, as he said, the dwarves’ good feeling towards the little hobbit grew stronger every day. There were no more groans or grumbles. They drank to his health, and they patted him on the back, and they made a great fuss of him; which was just as well, for he was not feeling particularly cheerful. He had not forgotten the look of the Mountain, nor the thought of the dragon, and he had beside a shocking cold. For three days he sneezed and coughed, and he could not go out, and even after that his speeches at banquets were limited to “Thag you very buch” (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit).

Once again, I have a cold. At least that’s my amateur non-medical opinion. I have a scratchy throat, stuffed nose, and a fluffy head. Oh, for the joys of being able to sleep in tomorrow.

I know most guys turn into babies when they have colds. At least that’s what the prevalent opinion is all over social media. I for one am not going to dispute that. I will crawl into my bed in the fetal position and possibly suck my thumb.

I am thankful that I got my flu shot this year. Colds are bad but the flu is worse. I should know.

Still, I am grateful for another day to be alive, even if I don’t feel so alive at the moment. When I ask a friend of mine how he’s doing, he almost always responds with “I’m living the dream.”

That’s me. I can say I’m living the dream. I’m living God’s dream for me and I eagerly await to see how that dream will unfold, but I know it will be good. It will be better than my wildest dreams and beyond my imagination.

Maybe I’ll dream about that instead of having the usual cold-inspired weird dreams that I normally have when I’m under the weather.

 

That Longing Inside

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till we have faces

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces).

It’s that longing. If you watch TV at all, you are led to believe that you can fill that longing with a new car or a new kitchen appliance. Or maybe if you drink the right beer or wear the right kind of sweaters. Just about anything and everything from fast food to cologne to mattresses will satisfy that deepest of longings inside of us, or so we’re told.

I think all of us have deep longings that nothing we do or buy or acquire can ever truly satisfy. For most of us, we’re unable to even name what that longing is or even pinpoint what it is that we truly desire.

That C. S. Lewis guy also said that if we have longings that nothing in this world can satisfy, then it means that we were created for another world. I think he was on to something.

I personally find myself longing more and more for a world I’ve never seen before, but one that I have dreamed about. I imagine it will look a whole lot like Mr. Lewis’ Narnia, especially the one described in toward the end of his book, The Last Battle.

“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces).