Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The God who raises the dead

Just wanted to share this with you all. God spoke to me directly through this last night. NT Wright is not just a scholar, no one can write this without experiencing God in his own life. That's why he's my fav writer, even when his scholarly works are sometimes too difficult for me...

From NT Wright's Following Jesus- Biblical Reflections on Discipleship

Do you know what the most frequent command in the Bible turns out to be? ..."Don't be afraid"

The irony of this surprising command is that, though it's what we all really want to hear, we have as much difficulty, if not more, in obeying thus command as any other. We all cherish fear so closely that we find we can't shed it even when we're told to do so.

... And the resurrection of Jesus issues the surprising command: don't be afraid; because the God who made the world is the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and calls you now to follow him...

(example of Paul from 2 Corinthians 8-9) "I was so utterly unbearably crushed, that I despaired of life itself; indeed I felt as though I had received the sentence of death."... "this was to make me rely on the God who raises the dead."...

Living by faith rather than by fear is so odd for us, so scary for us, that it takes a lot of learning...

All the other command that enable us to make sense of our human life follow this one. When we grasp at that which is not ours, it is because we are afraid that if we don't we won't have enough. When we use sex as a means of self-gratification rather than as the glorious affirmation of a lifelong commitment, we do so not just because of lust; lust itself is nurtured in fear, fear of rejection, fear of loneliness. When we lie, we do so because we are afraid that the truth will be embarrassing. And so on...

If then, we recognize the truth about the surpassing God, the God who raises the dead, we can trust him with every lesser task that may come our way. He can be trusted with exams, ... jobs, even when they don't necessarily work out the way we thought they should... marriage... money, even when it seems as though there is even less of it available than we had thought... old age... death itself.

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