Perspective

Are you joy-FULL? You and I ought to be. Oh how full of joy we ought to be!! If we are not, it probably means we are not looking at life from a biblical perspective. If this is not true, explain to me how to make sense out of passages like Acts 5:40-41 and Acts 16:23-25? How can it be that the apostles and Silas simultaneously suffered and were joyful? If my professor is right, the answer is found in their perspective – how they interpreted life. How do you interpret the common everyday events of your life? Do you see everything that happens to you as sweet providence from the hand of the Lord? Is God for you or against you? Rest assured, he is either for you or against you. What about these times of spiritual complacency you are going through? What about your laziness in discipline? Your lukewarm affections for your Creator? You should ask, “What are you trying to teach me Lord?” Do you see that he is trying to teach you just how desperately you need him for life, both today and into eternity? Do you see how gentle and kind and longsuffering he is with you even as you live as though he were not as significant as your comfort or your pleasure or your schedule? My dear brothers, you and I can live with a perspective like Paul’s and Silas’. How? Look at Christ. Gaze intently and closely and carefully and long upon him in his word – that is where he has revealed himself! Pick a gospel and read it carefully. See the love he has for you and love him more for it. Your life is but a vapor. Won’t you give it up completely because you see that your Master and Messiah gave his? You are not your own – you are a slave – and a slave is not better than his master. Won’t you die to yourself that you might live to Christ? Won’t you sell everything you have so that you might have the pearl of great price?

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.