As the Easter season continues our pastors at City Church are talking about resurrection stories found throughout the Bible. Today was the story about the woman with the issue of blood and Jairus' dughter having died. Jesus stops to heal the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years rather than rushing to the house of Jairus to help his daughter. The woman gets healed and Jesus heads off to "awake" the your girl from her sleep. She is raised from the dead and has new life. You can imagine Jairus' excitement in light of a second chance that both he and his daughter now have. As I was sitting through the service being reminded that we all die I realized that we all experience the consequence of sin being death. We all experience death. We all die. We all lose people. So though Christ has "saved" us we still experience the consequence of our actions by feeling loss when death occurs in our lives. There isn't anything that we can do to not ever experience death, thus we always will experience the depth of our depravity. Our salvation doesn't stop us from feeling the consequences of our sin. We are still sinful. We are still more wretched than we can understand and more loved than we can imagine. Knowing Christ doesn't eradicate the most awful feelings from our lives. Christ does not make life smooth, nor does positive thinking or any other form of self encouragement. There are parts of life that are just awful no matter what. I hate death only for selfish reasons. I hate that my friend isn't here any more and it's deaths fault. Therefore I hate death and I hate that I am experiencing the consequence of my sin.
May the unimaginable love win in my heart. Though I don't think it wins very often. I cannot escape my depraved humanity not can I perfect it. Living in it to it's fullest potential is my greatest challenge. My greatest potential is to love and be loved, I agree with Ewan McGregor's character in Moulin Rouge. Love is the only thing that matters. There is nothing else of any worth in comparison to love.
