Song of Solomon 8:7 - Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned.

One of the most audacious con men in American history, Frank Abagnale Jr., flew for free on more than 250 Pan Am flights, impersonating a deadheading pilot. He forged a Columbia University degree and taught sociology at BYU for a semester. He pretended to be a pediatrician at a Georgia hospital for almost a year, and for another year, after forging a Harvard degree, he passed the Louisiana bar exam and worked in the Louisiana State Attorney General's office. All before he turned 21.

You may be familiar with the movie made about his autobiography, Catch Me if You Can. In the fil, the event that is alleged to have started Abagnale on his life of crime is the divorce of his parents, brought about by his father's financial ruin in the face of an IRS investigation. Abagnale believed that his mother left his father because of the family's financial woes and that if their lifestyle could be restored (through his thievery), everything would be returned to normal.

The twisted lengths to which we will go to prove our love are astounding. And there's a bit of Frank Abagnale Jr. in all of us. We're all in some way working for love. Abagnale thought of it in literal financial terms: if he could "earn," in his own highly illegal way, enough money to set the family's lifestyle right, love would return. The IRS, in his view, was holding love hostage. Often Christians think of God as holding His love back until we earn it and acting according to that old extra-biblical proverb "God helps those who help themselves." Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is the truth, and it's a truth that Frank Abagnale Jr. probably could have stood to hear as a sixteen-year-old: the kind of love we actually need, the kind of love that satisfies, and the kind that really helps and changes people is not the kind that is deserved. In fact, real love is not handed out on merit at all. This is why the greatest love, the love that satisfies most deeply and changes us most thoroughly, is the love of God revealed in the free gift of grace in His Son Jesus Christ.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

1 Peter 5:10 - And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

Seemingly every day, we ask a question like this one: How could that have happened? How can it be that our mother has cancer? How can there be a God who allows children to be molested by their fathers? When you read books and articles by people who don't believe in God - once you get through all the pseudo-intellectual jibber jabber - their arguments come down to: "I can't believe in a God who presides over a world that has come out like this."

We tend to think that God is present in comfort but not present in pain. We tend to think that if God exists, He wouldn't have let this place go off the rails so badly. If you're looking at the world from that vantage point, and you see it as it is - all the suffering that is apparently allowed to happen - you would naturally think either that God doesn't exist, that He's not a very nice guy, or that someone in the situation sinned, right? In response to questions like that, though, Martin Luther said a very interesting thing. He said that a "theologian of glory" ends up calling the good bad, and the bad good. What did he mean by that?

It's quite simple, really. The things that we think are bad - suffering, pain, and the like - are actually the things that strip away our ability to rely on ourselves. They show us that we are incompetent saviors, and they remind us that we need salvation from outside ourselves. On the other hand, the things that we think are good - prosperity, health, comfort - are actually the things that build up our defenses against recognizing our true needs.

This is why Luther promoted the "theology of the cross." This theology looks at the world as it is and proclaims a God active in suffering and who suffered Himself. It proclaims a God who is active in suffering and who suffered Himself. It proclaims a God who comes to those in pain, a God who offers new life to the dying. 

Sin has made the world the way it is, but Christ, on the cross, has redeemed it.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

John 10:11-13

What we do in life is look for hired hands. This means that we look for people to tell us what we want to hear: "You're a good mother, a good son, a good coworker." All the while, though, we know deep down that it's just not true. That's why we keep asking. We think that if we get enough people to tell us that we're great, we might be able to believe it. But we never do.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He's not like the hired hands who run away when they see how bad things really are, when the wolves start to come, when your life starts to really fall apart, and when the "I'm okay, you're okay" charade starts to break down. And what does Jesus say? Not, "I'm the good shepherd. I know what my sheep need to hear." Not "I'm the good shepherd, I know how to get my sheep to relax." Not "I'm the good shepherd, and I know how to get my sheep in line." He says, "I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep."

The wolves are real. We feel guilty about all sorts of things in our lives. We have not loved God with our whole hearts; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. These are the wolves that are coming for us. We look for hired hands to tell us that these wolves aren't really all that bad. "Oh, you're not a bad person," they'll say. "You're sure better than so-and-so." And that'll make us feel better, until we look over our shoulder and see the pack of wolves just a little bit closer. So we look for another hired hand. But then, as things get worse and worse, hired hands start quitting. When we do something that makes it impossible for someone to say, "You're not a bad person," we find that there's no one around anyway.

No one, that is, except Jesus, who lays down His life for us.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Job 19:25

I know that my Redeemer lives!

Now, if we're being honest with ourselves, who woke up this morning ready to make a proclamation like Job's? Don't we more often think, I sure hope my redeemer lives. We envy the people who have this kind of faith. But us? We're a little more wobbly. We're freshly recovering from a fight with our friend or our spouse. We're trying to forget about the situation at work that might end up getting us fired. We can't stop thinking about the trouble that our children have gotten themselves into. We consider the people in our lives, wondering what they would think of us if they knew what was really going on. We hope that our Redeemer lives. We know for sure that we need redeeming, otherwise we wouldn't have read a devotion like this. But we're not 100 percent sure that redemption is available for us. We hope it is, Job, though, seems pretty confident.

But this is Job! Job, the one guy who doesn't seem to have any reason to be confident. Job is the guy who was minding his own business, living a good life, when he became the subject of a bet between God and Satan. Job, whose wife deserts him and whose children all die, whose cattle are killed and who is covered, head to foot, with sores. And yet, in his suffering - through his suffering - Job is aware that he has a Redeemer.

When Jesus hung on the cross, His cry was not for a redeemer. When He was abandoned by those who loved Him, when He was assaulted, beaten, scorned, mocked, tortured, and killed, He didn't say, "I know that My Redeemer lives." He said, "It is finished." He might as well have said, "You cry out for a redeemer. I am the redeemer, and I have done My work."

Jesus' "it is finished" - His life, death, and resurrection - is our assurance. We have a Redeemer, and He lives.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

John 1:45-46

Nathanael"s question for Philip, "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" is the eternal human question. "Can anything good come out of losing my job?" "Can anything good come out of someone who loved me turning their back on me?" "Can anything good come out of this life?"

The question is asked from a place of hopelessness. If Nathanael thought that good things could come from Nazareth, there'd be no need for him to ask the question. If we thought that good things could come from the terrible, intractable situations we find ourselves in, we wouldn't be wondering all the time: "What good could possibly come of this?" To all of these questions, all of these hopeless questions, Philip offered words of hope. He said, "Come and see."

Jesus has none of the qualities we traditionally associate with goodness and success. He's not rich, not a socialite, not beautiful. He wasn't attractive in any traditional sense (Isaiah 53:2). God chose to come to earth in Him and as Him. He chose to be a citizen of Nazareth and chose to remain a citizen of Nazareth. When Philip said, "Come and see," he wasn't thinking of Jesus' wealth of His intelligence or His beauty. He was talking about the gospel.

Can we believe that good things can come out of Nazareth? Yes, God always chooses to work in places like Nazareth. This is good news, because it means that God chooses to work in people like you and me. People who aren't successful. People who aren't rich. People who aren't powerful. People who aren't necessarily intelligent. People who aren't beautiful. God works in you, and he works in me! That is good news indeed.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

We Christians have a remarkable tendency to focus almost exclusively on the fruit of the problem. We do this as parents with our children, pastors with our parishioners, husbands with wives, and wives with husbands. We do this with ourselves.

The Gospel, on the other hand, always addresses the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is not bad behavior. Bad behavior is the fruit of something deeper. Our chief problem, as Jesus made clear, is :not what goes into a man," but the defiled heart - the root.

Christian growth consists not of behavior modification but of the daily realization that in Christ we have died and in Christ we have been raised. Daily reformation, therefore, is the fruit of daily resurrection (Romans 6:1-11). To get it the other way around (which we always do by default) is to miss the power and the point of the Gospel. In his book God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis makes the point that "you can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." Behavior (good or bad) is a second thing.

"Life is a web of trials and temptation," said Robert Capon, Episcopal priest and author, "but only one of them can ever be fatal, and that is the temptation to think it is by further, better, and more aggressive living that we can have life." The truth is, you can't live your way to life - you can only "die your way there, lose you way there... For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctable; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot."

Moral renovation, in other words, is to refocus our eyes away from ourselves to that man's obedience, to that man's cross, to that man's blood, to that man's death and resurrection.

Learning daily to love the glorious exchange (our sin for His righteousness), to lean on its finished-ness, and to live under its banner is what it means to be morally reformed!

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

In the movie Flight, Denzel Washington plays a troubled-but-talented airline pilot who manages to successfully land a crashing commercial jetliner despite being under the influence of more substances than you could count and whose alleged inebriation causes his heroism to be called into question.

Flight spends most of its time painting a graphic, realistic, and relentless picture of the life of an addict and, therefore, of the life of a human person. It echoes Paul's words from Roman 7, "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing" (v. 19), but with one important difference: Washington's character thinks he knows what he's doing! It's always worked out before, and even when things seemed to be going tragically wrong, he was able to perform in ways that no other pilot (even a sober one) could.

In the film's most powerful scene, a fellow addict (played by Kelly Reilly) tells Washington's character that she's worried about him. "Worried about me?" he responds indignantly. "Worry about you! We're not the same... I choose to drink!" "It doesn't seem much like a choice to me," she replies. Reilly's character has added the "I do not understand what I do" of Romans 7:15 and tears the blinders from Washington's flight from himself.

For every scene in which Washington promises sobriety (When it is in his obvious legal interest to remain sober), there is a companion scene, showing us his continued spiral toward bottom. In the end, it is the bottoming out that leads to freedom. "I might be a chump," he says in a final scene, "But I couldn't tell any more lies."

The most common lie we tell is one to ourselves - that we have it all together, that we know what we're doing, and that we're in control. It takes bottoming out to lead us the the Promised Land. "My grace is sufficient for you," the tagline might as well read, "for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,