Where Things Went Wrong With Freedom

We are hearing much these days about freedom. We have the “freedom-fighters” rebelling in the Middle East. We see so many dictators taking “freedom” away from the common people.

One political approach is that people should be free in their lives to start new businesses and run their daily lives without the intrusions of government. The other political approach is that people need government control because so many are not free to live the “good” life because of poverty and disease.

To understand freedom, we must focus on the true meaning of freedom. We humans have played fast and loose with the word. We tend to regard the word as meaning a situation where we can be or do anything. Not so. Freedom is a meaningless concept unless it is freedom to choose. If there was only one thing in the world, there would be no choice, and therefore no freedom. There would not be such a word.

But freedom has as its firm base the responsibility of making intelligent choices, and right ones. Then, when we have made our choices, freedom has its limitless expression within the limiting bounds of that choice.

Repeating, freedom is LIMITLESS potential expressed within LIMITED choice. Marriage would be a human illustration. A supposedly intelligent choice is made, and then all freedom in family living is expressed within the limits of that choice. A young person chooses a profession, and then within its boundaries puts all he has into the development of the calling.

The starting point of this being the meaning of freedom is that it is stated to be true of God. We say He is unlimited. But the Bible says He is limited. Paul speaks of God who cannot lie. The writer to the Hebrews says it is impossible for God to lie. Not that He does not lie or should not, or did not, but He cannot. Therefore there is something God cannot do. What does that mean? The lie is one form of self-centeredness. It is preserving one’s own interests at the expense of another. Therefore, it is saying that God cannot be a self-seeker, self-lover, self-magnifier.

Why, if God is freedom? Because freedom means right choice and all activities as an expression of that choice; and it is here saying that from eternity that “choice” has been God’s eternal nature. He “cannot” be a self-seeker. He can only be a self-giver. Everything He has ever thought or done in His “freedom” is some form of self-giving. There is nothing else within the boundaries of His freedom.

 So you see, God has given us humans freedom of choice – a necessary first step toward freedom of action within that choice. The right choice is self-giving, a choice not often seen in human history. Oh, it is seen in the rest of creation – in an involuntary way, everything has its true life, not in being itself, but in becoming others or something to others. The tree becomes the chair and table; the bread and meat become our body; water is our life. Everything is a servant, by giving up its independent life to become somebody else’s life; this is God life.

But back to us humans. Immediately there arises the dilemma of all history. If God must have free persons by whom to express Himself in freedom, then we must choose God and His boundaries of freedom! And we must be sure it is the right choice.   

We cannot say that God ever made a choice in time, as we do; but we say that God, the three-in-one, always was love. But for us there is the choice. We, as created persons, could have consciously chosen to affirm that relationship and thus be natural free expressions of the free self-giving God. But equally, in freedom of choice, we can choose to be ourselves as if independent if god and live in the illusion, yet dreadful reality for us, of being independent self-loving selves.

We, in our freedom, can be united to Him in His freedom, every limitless human faculty freely expressing Him. He loves and we love. He thinks and we think, He wills and we will. He acts and we act – we humans being in essence God walking, God talking, God acting, God loving, in John’s words, “as He is, so are we in this world.” Are all humans that? Obviously, tragically not!

Then what has happened? It is not hard to see. Indeed, the Bible makes it quite plain. FREEDOM CAN BE MISUSED. It can make the wrong choice, which God the original Self, never made.  

The fall of angels and humans broke open a dimension of the self-life which should never have been exposed, which never was known in God, a dimension where all that self-centeredness produces and actually becomes its way of life – pride, lust, hatred, jealousy, lying and the rest. The Bible speaks of this as “becoming as a god” for a god is an originator, and this choice of independence began this kingdom of lawless freedom which the Bible calls sin.

If, in our freedom, we choose just to live as ourselves and for ourselves, we have diverted the self to a use which never should have been in existence; but if, in our freedom, we choose our being in God, and now through the redemption and our living in union with Christ, we find a freedom in action that has limitless boundaries of self-giving love.

So, when voices yell “FREEDOM!”, we must consider what they mean – and what GOD means. The wrong choice has its own boundaries of freedom, and they ain’t good – but the right choice has GOD’s boundaries of freedom – and there ain’t nothin’ like it!

I’m going to date myself, but back in the 50’s Bing Crosby sang a song about freedom:

O give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above – Don’t fence me in!

Let me ride through the wide open country that I love – Don’t fence me in!
Let me be by myself in the evening breeze,
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don’t fence me in!
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder til I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences,
And gaze at the moon til I lose my senses,
I can’t look at hovels and I can’t stand fences,
DON’T FENCE ME IN!

 This cowboy sounds like he really likes the freedom of God’s creation. I hope that it is through a relationship with God Himself. 

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Romans Says It All

I see God as presenting a loving three-fold approach to fully redeem and liberate lost mankind to the purpose for which we were created. These three stages are nowhere more clearly explained and presented to us than in the great Roman letter. Let’s now examine them more closely, always bearing in mind their ultimate goal: that man was originally created and now re-created in Christ to find his place in God and He in us.

The first stage may be called the outward approach. Man starts out as an extrovert, or at least he seeks to live like one. To look too far within might be disturbing. He tries to live on the surface; work, pleasure, practical interests, social and religious activities, the world’s merry-go-round. So it is from the outside that God approaches him. He can understand a God in heaven; he can see a Savior in history; he can recognize the sins he himself has committed. On this level, then, the gospel is preached to him.
Look at the first five chapters of Romans, where more plainly than anywhere else in Scripture, the way of salvation is presented. First, “God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (1:18). Then the sins of men are exposed in loathsome detail, and attributed to a worship of the creature rather than the Creator (1:21-32). The coming day of the righteous judgment of God is proclaimed (2:5-11). No pronouncements could be in plainer language: a child can understand them. The verdict of guilty on all the world is unmistakably foretold for the simple reason that all have sinned (3:19-23).
The gospel of free grace is then presented in the same practical, objective and reasonable form. There is a way by which the guilty are pronounced righteous. God has a worthy substitute for all to see at an exact place and on a fixed date: Jesus Christ (3:24-25). And it is not by works of self-effort but by “believing on Him who justifies the ungodly (3:27-28). To that man or woman who so believes, “his faith is counted for righteousness” (4:3-5).
The primitive forest-dweller, the little child, or alternatively, the sophisticated intellectual, hedonist, religious, can all understand such facts, if they will.
It does not deal with any such matters as our dwelling in God and He in us; it does not draw attention to the ramifications of the self-life, or raise questions of soul and spirit. In these first five chapters of Romans, up to 5:11, no reference is made to an inner relationship to God, except the one statement that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
But what a change in Romans 6! What does Paul mean when he suddenly alters the emphasis from Christ’s dying to my having died? (6:2). This takes us at once from the objective, outward approach to the second stage: the internal but still independent approach – from the historical to the mystical and spiritual. Anyone can understand the historical fact of the Savior dying for us, but who can understand the statement that we are dead? Quite obviously, physically speaking, we are not dead! And still less buried, as 6:4 says! Now we are passing on to where man really lives – within himself.
We have seen how the natural man will escape the discomfort of looking within himself, if he can, and God meets him where he lives. But, when he has come to Christ, and the Son has been revealed in him as his Savior, it will not be long before he finds out that the real problems of life are within. At his birth, it was his past sins that concerned him; but now he discovers that it is not the sins, but the sinner that must be dealt with. “Shall we continue in sin?” asks the apostle. The rebirthed Christian now wants to follow Christ, but what is he to do with the influences that rise up to prevent him? There are the attractions of the world, the distractions of home and business, the deadness in prayer and Bible study, the powerlessness in witness. He has to face the fact that the joy of sins forgiven, the gift of eternal life, the knowledge of Jesus as Savior and Friend does not give him the inner release and victory he needs. Often he seems to be still overpowered by sin and self; he struggles, he resolves, he prays; but one powerful sin or another keeps winning him over.
Paul gives the answer as no other writer in the New Testament. He leads us now into this second stage, to which the first was a gateway, and from which the third is a normal and necessary continuation.
He now begins to open up an inner relationship with God. For the saved man, though he does know Christ, he normally regards Him as apart from himself, often even outside himself, and sometimes so separate that there appears a great distance between them. Sometimes this especially appears to be so in prayer, or in time of crisis and bewilderment. Even very often, from our pulpits, no nearer presentation of Christ is given to the believer than that He is a Friend close at hand. The veil of a false separation is left over the eyes. Here, of course, lies the great error. It leaves man to do the very thing he was never created nor redeemed to do, to carry on by self-effort helped, he hopes, by the assistance of God.
We see in Romans 6 how Paul pointed out that in our redeemed experience of salvation by faith and new birth in Christ, we do not continue in sin. The reason is that as our Lord died and rose again as representing us, we then died with Him to being  sin-indwelt and rose with Him to being Christ-indwelt, as symbolized by our burial and rising in our water baptism.
But this is based on a further startling fact of a different kind – that we are no longer “under law, but under grace,” and that we are “dead to law” as well as “dead to sin.” But wait a minute! If we are not under law, don’t we mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic radical delusion that we have lived in since our human birth – the lie of us being independent, self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. Not so.
Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness owner; branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine; married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There never has been such a thing as us being independent, self-producing human selves, and responding ourselves to a law of evil or good.
Paul proceeds to Romans 7 to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage in this radical misconception, and thus his freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life. In Romans 7:7-25 Paul turns from general statements to the strictly personal. How do I find that the Christian life works? How do you? To explain, Paul does a big thing. He deliberately backtracks from his actual present experience as “dead to the law” and aligns himself with every born-again believer, using the present tense of “I, I, I.” He shares with us his earlier years of spiritual adolescence, and finally his searching and wrestling right through to the final answer for himself, and thus for all of us.
Paul’s use of the present tense about himself in sharing what he had long left behind has been misunderstood through all these succeeding years by millions of sincere believers, who have themselves not entered into the final understanding. Thinking that the furthest a believer can know in life is humiliation, struggles and constant failures under sin’s apparent dominion, they have falsely deduced a “two nature” condition, as if we humans are permanently caught up in the opposing strife of sin and holiness natures. Then we would have to oscillate despairingly between them and take them for granted as our normal experience.
The truth is that our God-created human self is merely a neutral vessel, or container. In Romans 7:17-18, Paul described it as being in itself neither the good nor the bad. It is merely the fruit producer of whichever vine it is a branch of and it can never be a branch of both at once.
Paul describes in detail his past dramatic experience. It was the sudden impact of that tenth commandment, with its “Thou shalt not covet,” which so rudely awakened him. He had been blissfully ignorant (7:9) and that is how all the world lives until confronted by the law. Paul had been “delighting in the law” (7:22). But under the lie of independent self, when that “Thou shalt not covet” struck him, he blindly thought, “No, of course I won’t and don’t.”
Then the blast hit him. Paul found an influence over which he had no control, which he named sin. He was devastated, not that there were these sin drives, but because he thought he ought to be able to control them. “I want to do good but there is an evil presence influencing me” (7:22). “I want to do the good and not the evil” (repeated in verses 14, 15, 18, 19 and 21).
There He says, “I am a wretched man” (7:24), a new-born Christian but still a slave to sin. Where lies the trouble? Is there a remedy?
The trouble is in that deceived, independent “I” popping up 32 times in those 19 verses. It is the enormous delusion which the law came to expose.
So all self-effort is Satan-backed effort whether good or bad in appearance. Paul lived with a godly nature of Christ (as all Christians do) but was externally influence by Satan.
In his self-delusion Paul was so ashamed and humiliated that he said he was like a slain man (7:7-11).
While in our deceived, self-relying state, we have to be confronted with the law and the standards by which the universe was created to function. These laws were first embodied outwardly for our enlightenment in those Ten Commandments from which any deviation finally brings total destruction. We are forced to accept the realization that first we didn’t fulfill them (conviction of sin) and second, we can’t fulfill them which is the final discovery of this Romans 7 chapter. You have no independent human ability to keep or not keep the law.
Now we move with Paul into Romans 8. Here he comes right out with the third and final stage of God’s approach to man – the internal and dependent rather than independent approach.
What Paul said he had “reckoned” on in 6:11, he now says he “realizes” (8:2). The governing principle, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” has set him free. Now at the summit there is no condemnation. We are freed from that false self guilt – we are Spirit people in outer bodies. Now we are under Christ’s law with no escape. That old law standard, which had seemed unattainable, is now our natural way of living – “the righteousness of the law fulfilled in us”(8:3-4). Paul lays unique emphasis on life being the Spirit in us. Nowhere else in the New Testament is this said in such plainness. There are 15 mentions of the Spirit in chapter 8 in place of those many “I’s” in the previous chapter.
Paul says, “Get this clear! We are now Spirit people. Christ is living our life. We are walking His way (8:3). We think His thoughts (8:5-6). He in us counteracts those former self-for-self thought patterns.”
Certainly there are flesh pulls – sin’s self-for-self influence getting at us through all the world’s atmosphere around us. But we don’t resist them by any false self-effort. We recognize and admit them, but then we affirm who we ARE and know we ARE – Christ in our forms; and our faith affirmation puts to death those influences (8:13).
The normal background to our daily lives is the Spirit’s witness that we actually are God’s children (8:16).
From the moment in 8:17 when he opens up the incredible destiny of us humans being co-inheritors of the universe with God’s Son, Paul changes the tone of what we are to experience in our daily lives. This talk of sufferings comes as a shock until we see at the end of the chapter that those are the devastating condition in which we, as sons, operate triumphantly as Christ people.
Paul says the animal and material creation around us is engulfed in suffering – living in tension. The deliverance will come through the sons of God, but the methods aren’t explained in detail (8:19-22).
The Paul goes a glorious step further. He opens up the hidden purpose behind our suffering and disturbed conditions.  He says these are necessary training years on earth. But we must not confuse God’s soul transforming operations, taking place in us through those constant trials and pressures, with the total basuc transformation of human spirit already taken place. Growth in conforming us to the image of Christ (8:29) is the daily spontaneous development of trusting in our Christ union.
And then that glorious chapter ending verses of total security – we will be forever enveloped in the love of God as His child and nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

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Happy 400th, King James Bible

May 2, 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the printing of the book commonly known in America as the King James Bible. How well do you know the history of what led to the making of the King James Bible? Only a few know the real history and goal. This history leading up to the publication of the King James Bible is worth knowing – lest history repeat itself! There was one single goal: Give everyone the opportunity to become a Bible student.

By the 1500s, the Renaissance had swept across Europe. The dark oppression of the Catholic clergy was broken by the light of education in art, literature, math and science. The invention of the printing press in 1450 made the production and distribution of educational materials readily available for a public eager to gather them up.
The first book published by printing press inventor Johann Guttenberg was a Latin-language Bible. The Bible was the hottest selling item in Europe at this time. The Catholic church having for centuries made it forbidden had made it even more popular.
Early in the 16th century, Disiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), a Dutch scholar, became an international celebrity. A founding father of the Renaissance, he is best known for his 1508 book In Praise of Folly, a satire on society. He did not spare the practices of the church and clergy. Having a rich knowledge of Greek, Erasmus grew to prominence lecturing at Cambridge. He studied the best early Greek texts he could find in order to make a Latin text that was more accurate than the Vulgate. Though his project was considered sacrilege to Catholic authorities – who would dare tamper with the Vulgate? – his goal was to direct scholars to the Bible in order to cleanse the Catholic church of error. Erasmus’s New Testament had its greatest impact at Cambridge, at that time considered the intellectual home of the English Reformation.
Then, in 1517, Martin Luther, a member of the theology faculty at Wittenberg University, began to speak out against papal indulgences. He invited scholars across Europe to join him in the study of what the Bible had to say about church doctrine. For Luther, the Bible was a rival to the authority of the pope. Rome called for him to recant. He refused and widely circulated numerous books explaining his beliefs throughout Europe and England. His writings found special residence at Cambridge. Martin Luther produced a German-language Bible in the years 1523 to 1529.
When Luther’s books were banned at Cambridge, revolutionary thinking students such as William Tyndale, a priest, theologian and gifted linguist, fled the university. Tyndale intended to translate the Bible into English from fresh sources following in the tradition of Erasmus. When denied approval by the English Catholic church authorities, he found financial support for his translation project through a wealthy cloth merchant who provided him with food and shelter.
Tyndale was a linguistic genius. He was proficient in eight languages. His intensive labor produced an English translation that was so astoundingly clear that common people could easily read and understand it. He had a true gift for transmitting the original meaning from one language to another. Much of his New Testament translation still appears as originally written in today’s King James Bible.
Authorities could not short-circuit the demand for Tyndale’s work. They resorted to buying copies simply to burn them. The battle over the Bible became very bloody. Many, including Tyndale, who was betrayed by a friend, lost their lives fighting for the right to have the Bible in their native tongue. The calculated ecclesiastical destruction of Tyndale’s Bible was so thorough that only three copies survive to this day.
Eventually the Bible was in England became tangled with Henry VIII’s battle to divorce his first wife. After winning his fight with Rome, the proud king soon realized that he faced an incredible dilemma. The nation was bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants. He recognized that even the newly established English church was splintering into religious factions. Henry’s leading counselors urged him to produce a new official Bible to attempt to reunite the nation.
Henry laid the task at the feet of the English bishops. But because of deep disagreement nothing had been done by 1535. So began a new kind of war, not one of Bible translation but one of Bible interpretation.
By the time James I (James VI of Scotland) came to the throne, two bloodstained centuries of war over Bible translation had taken place. As James ascended the throne, essentially that war was over. People were free to own and read the Scriptures. Now came the need to strip the English Bible of all interpretation.
At the suggestion of church leaders, James personally convened the Hampton Court Conference on Jan. 1, 1604, to officially start the massive translation project. He set strict guidelines to ensure translator objectivity and that only the purest translation of the Scriptures was brought into English.
The Bible was divided among six teams of scholars; two each were set up at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. Not only did they use the best Hebrew and Greek texts, they took advantage of every available version to compare the variant readings. The basic text was completed in four years. Then the translation was subjected to two additional years of further checking. Then, to ensure the very best translation, in 1610 another team, two men from each of the original six teams, completed a final check.
After all these years of grueling translation and proof, the authorized Bible was published in May 2, 1611. Its contribution to Western society is without question. It has molding and shaped our thinking.
Many have died to give us the right to own, read and study this incredible book. Do we highly value that right? If we don’t, we could easily lose it. In the apparent coming of religious war, the Bible is certain to figure prominently in that war.
Around the world today, many are losing their lives over owning or reading a Bible. It is said that there are more Christian martyrs in the last hundred years than there were in the twenty centuries since Christ. And much of this martyrdom was over the Bible.
Britain and America became great nations as this book grew to become the bestseller of all time.
If we forget this book, could history forget us? If, on the other hand, we see this remarkable book we call the Bible as God’s own words, then we will appreciate that printing of the Bible 400 years ago for the purpose of being understood by the common people. Then we will take it off our bookshelves, open it and search for the solutions to the problems that are about to overwhelm us.
God help us to come to the right answer.

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A Mother's Day Tribute

A tribute to mothers


Somebody said it takes about six weeks to get back to normal after you’ve had a baby.
Somebody doesn’t know that once you’re a mother, “normal” is history.

Somebody said you learn how to be a mother by instinct.
Somebody never took a three-year-old shopping.

Somebody said that if you’re a good mother, your child will turn out to be well behaved.
Somebody thinks a child comes with directions and a guarantee.

Somebody said you don’t need an education to be a mother.
Somebody never helped a fourth-grader with math.

Somebody said you can’t love the fifth child as much as you love the first.
Somebody doesn’t have five children.

Somebody said a mother can find all the answers to her child rearing questions in books.
Somebody never had a child stuff beans up his nose or ears.

Somebody said the hardest part of being a mother is labor and delivery.
Somebody never watched her “baby” get on the bus for the first day of kindergarten – or on a plane headed for military camp.

Somebody said a mother can do her job with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back.
Somebody never organized four giggling Brownies to sell cookies.

Somebody said a mother can stop worrying after her child gets married.
Somebody doesn’t know that marriage adds a new son or daughter-in-law to a mother’s heartstrings.

Somebody said a mother’s job is done when her last child leaves home.
Somebody never had grandchildren.

Somebody said your mother knows you love her, so you don’t need to tell her.
Somebody isn’t a mother.

St. Louis, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Is the God of St. Louis, Missouri also the God of Tuscaloosa, Alabama??

“No deaths in St. Louis tornado called a miracle” – Headline, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 25, 2011
Only days after tornadoes ripped through the St. Louis area without killing anyone, other tornadoes and storms killed at least 200 people in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And just last month a historic earthquake and tsunami in Japan claimed 14,400 lives, with more than 11,600 still missing.
So why have so many died elsewhere but not in St. Louis? Does God love Americans more than Japanese? Or people in St. Louis more than people in Tuscaloosa? Are people in St. Louis “better” people than those in Alabama who maybe require a little punishment?
Hopefully, everything within you says no. God’s heart breaks over all these tragedies. Simplistic answers don’t add up.
We don’t know why some live through such events and others don’t. God does intervene in a miracle for some, but in most cases He just lets nature take its course. One thing we must not do is sound like the disciples who presumed that God us punishing the suffering. Everyone suffers at times – this we know.
The Bible does tell us that when sin entered the world, God said that nature itself would work against the people. "Cursed is the ground because of you…. It will produce thorns and thistles…until you return to the ground" (Genesis 3:17-19). When the first people sinned, nature itself went awry - and nature will win over every person, and every person will return to the dust from which they came (v. 19). Old age will strike - unless something else does first - and nature will have its say.
Paul says that creation itself "was subjected to frustration" (Romans 8:20), and it waits for the day when it "will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom" (v. 21). Frankly, we do not know how physics would function without "decay" of some sort, and we do not know how God will fix the problem. But we do know that there is something wrong with nature, caused by sin, and God had chosen to allow that - even with the difficulties it causes, even though those "difficulties" are sometimes huge disasters that kill thousands of innocent people. Sin often affects innocent people, and sin has somehow affected nature itself.
We may pray for the day when "the times comes for God to restore everything" (Acts 3:21), but we still have to live in the world gone awry.
Jesus saved His disciples from a natural disaster - the storm on the sea of Galilee. He saved Paul and his companions on a storm-caused shipwreck near Malta. But nature still had its way, for they all eventually died. Many were killed by evil people, others by disease (another example of nature gone awry), some by old age. God allows nature to take its toll. Not forever, not permanently, but God still lets it happen. Someday, I suppose, we will see how magnificent the plan is, but for now it seems quite messy.
Jesus talked about a natural disaster in one man’s life. Who sinned, the disciples asked: this man, or his parents? Neither one, said Jesus (John 9:1-3). Not all problems can be pinpointed to a particular sin. It’s just that nature doesn’t always work the way it is supposed to, and for this particular man, the result was a disaster in his own life. Jesus fixed that particular problem, but most of the time, He allows His people to suffer the consequences of a world messed up by sin, where even the forces of nature work against us.
Jesus talked about another disaster in Jerusalem: the tower of Siloam fell and killed 18 people. It was not a natural disaster, of course, but a disaster nonetheless, a tragedy that killed innocent people. Jesus did not spend time blaming the engineers or the builders. Instead, He turned to the audience and said, "Unless you repent, you too will all perish" (Luke 13:4-5). Take that disaster, and instead of blaming somebody, examine yourself. Get your priorities in order, and the chief priority is your relationship with God.
Bad things happen to good people as well as to the bad. The disaster that hit someone else could have just as easily hit us. God could allow it to hit us just as well as He could allow it to hit them - that’s the lesson we need to consider from these tragedies. We need to turn to God, to trust Him even when the so-called "acts of God" strike close to home.
During his tremendous trial, Job said, "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (Job 13:15). We need a similar kind of trust - knowing that the God who did not spare His own Son will never cut us off, though we walk into the valley of the shadow of death, though we enter death itself. The God who spared not His own Son also rescued His Son after He went through that valley, and He promises to rescue us, too. He will give us life again, but to do it, we live in a world that takes life away.
If Jesus were talking to the families of the 18 people killed by the tower collapse, He no doubt would have been as compassionate as He was with the man born blind. When we are dealing with the victims of tornadoes or any other disaster, we need compassion too - compassion that motivates us to help. Many of you have given generously, and no doubt will continue to help during the long recovery period. But we also need to examine ourselves. When tragedy strikes someone else, we do not need to ask where God is - we need to ask where we are, and whether we can do something about it. The only thing worse than nature gone awry is a heart gone cold.
Can we trust God even when nature strikes us dead? Yes, we should, for one way or another, nature will strike every one of us dead. We have nowhere else to turn, for God has the only solution to the problem. But we need to trust Him.
When disaster strikes, God is there, suffering in His people, and working in His people. Therefore, when disaster strikes, God’s people can be found standing with Him, not casting blame, but helping out, making a positive difference, loving as Jesus loves.
Was this latest tornado a St. Louis “miracle”? Maybe it was! But, more likely, it was just a case of people saved by being in the right place at the right time.
God loves Tuscaloosa just as much as St. Louis. We’ve all sinned but God loves us all. In the big scheme, God wins, and so do those who accept His grace. As Christians, we can take God’s love to the victims.
So although we don’t have all the answers, we are grateful for no loss of life in St. Louis and now focus on those whom we can help.

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