I have a friend who pursues God with everything that he has, but can’t seem to escape the grips of his recurring depression.
He and I started talking about what it really means to be freed—to find abundant life—because he’s doing everything that he knows how, and he can’t seem to find it.
I don’t know if many of us ever do find it.
But this week, I think I found an answer in Hebrews 12. And I think it tells us that the path to becoming a new, free man may look a lot like incredible suffering.
It says that it is the suffering that makes us righteous and free. God uses tough discipline to make us into righteous people, like good fathers do!
It says to look at Jesus, who suffered to the point of shedding blood. And I think of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, who appears to have struggled so much that he was sweating blood. If that is the path that he had to forge resulting in death and finding new life, then I shouldn’t be scared when I go through hard times. Because maybe it is then, when he is disciplining me, that he's getting me closer to a death of myself and the resurrection of the new man inside of me.
“For the time being no discipline brings joy, but seems grievous and painful; but afterwards it yields a peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:11
I don’t mean to say we must suffer as much as Jesus did to find new life, or that God inflicts hard suffering on us, but that we shouldn’t be afraid of suffering, because He just might be using it to do a new work inside of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment