suffering, sunday

Sunday, October 26

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

          

Opening Prayer: Father, I know my wounded and broken places oh so well.  At times they can consume me and keep me from being able to hear your voice.  Help me to see my pain as an invitation to know you more intimately rather than a reason to doubt the goodness of your heart.  Help me to know that through my pain you desire to accomplish something very good in me.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

Scripture Reading for the Day: Hebrews 2:10-18

Reading for Reflection:

 

     The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged.  But O the agony of this enlarging of the heart, that one may be prepared to enter into the anguish of others!  Yet the way of holy obedience leads out from the heart of God and extends through the Valley of the Shadow.

     But there is also removable suffering, yet such as yields only to years of toil and fatigue and unconquerable faith and perchance only to death itself.  The Cross as dogma is painless speculation; the Cross as lived suffering is anguish and glory.  Yet God, out of the pattern of His own heart, has planted the Cross along the road of holy obedience.  And he enacts in the hearts of those He loves the miracle of willingness to welcome suffering and to know it for what it is-the final seal of His gracious love.  I dare not urge you to your Cross.  But He, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world’s needs.  By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God’s burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us.  And He gives us the royal blindness of faith, and the seeing eye of the sensitized soul, and the grace of unflinching obedience.  Then we see that nothing matters, and that everything matters, and that this my task matters for me and for my fellow men and for Eternity.  And if we be utterly humble we may be given strength to be obedient even unto death, yea the death of the Cross.

     In my deepest heart I know that some of us have to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again.  The times are too tragic, God’s sorrow is too great, man’s night too dark, the Cross is too glorious for us to live as we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience.  (A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

                                 

Closing Prayer:

Dear Jesus,

     Thank you for the hard and sometimes uphill road I have had to walk in following you.  I am stronger because of it.  And we are closer because of it.  For all good things that have come to me along the way, I thank you.

     But I have to say, I wish it were an easier way, a shorter way, a more scenic way.  I wish the road didn’t have to go past the garden of Gethsemane, with its darkness and loneliness and tears.  I wish it just went in endless circles around the seashores of Galilee, and that walking with you were more of a serene stroll in the sunset.

     Help me to understand that Gethsemane is as necessary as Galilee in the geography of a growing soul.  Help me to remember that even though you were a son, yet you learned obedience through the things you suffered. 

     Paul talks about entering into fellowship of your suffering.  I do so very much look forward to having fellowship with you, but honestly, Lord, the thought of having too suffer to experience it stops me in my tracks.

     Help me, Lord Jesus, to want your company more than I want serenity, and to love fellowship with you more than I fear the suffering necessary to enter into it.

(Reflections on the Word by Ken Gire)