Hello! Sorry this is late, I just got home from out of town. This devotional is taken straight from The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. I loved this section so much that I didn’t change one word of it! If you haven’t read this whole book yet I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s all about the unconditional grace and love we receive from Christ, and it will truly change your life. So again, the rest of this is all from Brennan Manning starting around page 114. Enjoy!
Our response to the love of Jesus demands trust. Do we rely on our resume or the gospel of grace? How do we cope with failure?
“Grace tell us that we are accepted just as we are. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we may not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in his hands. Such is his promise to us in Jesus Christ, a promise we can trust.” McCullough, 122
For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened,” He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love. He knew that physical pain, the loss of loved ones, failure, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal would sap our spirits; that the day would come when faith would no longer offer any drive, reassurance, or comfort; that prayer would lack any sense of reality or progress.
“For the high priest we have is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as ourselves, apart from sin. Let us, then, have no dear in approaching the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace when we are in need of help.” Hebrews 4:15-16
A poet has written, “The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let it go and you will be free.” Just as the sunrise of faith requires the sunset of our former unbelief, so the dawn of trust requires letting go of our craving spiritual consolations and tangible reassurances. Trust at the mercy of the response it receives is bogus trust. All is uncertainty and anxiety. In trembling insecurity the disciple pleads for proofs from the Lord that her affection is returned. If she does not receive them, she is frustrated and starts to suspect that her relationship with Jesus is all over or that it never even existed.
If she does receive consolation, she is reassured, but only for a time. She presses for further proofs-each one less convincing than the one that went before. In the end, the need to trust dies of pure frustration. What the disciple has not learned is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or guarantee any certainty of its presence. Jesus calls us to hand over our autonomous self in unshaken confidence. When the craving for reassurances is stifled, trust happens.
The mystery of Jesus’ ascension into heaven contains an important lesson. He said to His disciples: “I am telling you the truth: it is for your own good that I am going.” (John 16:7). Why? How could Jesus’ departure profit the apostles? Because while He was still visible on earth, there was the danger they would be too wedded to the sight of His flesh, that they would leave the certainty of faith and lean upon the tangible evidence of the senses. To see Jesus in the flesh was good but “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29).
Only love empowers the leap in trust, the courage to risk everything on Jesus, the readiness to move into the darkness guided only by a pillar of fire. Trust clings to the belief that whatever happens in our life is designed to teach us holiness. The love of Christ inspires trust to thank God for the nagging headache, the arthritis that is so painful, the spiritual darkness that envelops us; to say with Job, “If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow too?” (Job 2:10)
A Bahamian priest related a story that captures the essence of biblical trust: “A two-story house had caught on fire. The family- father, mother, and several children- were on their way out when the smallest boy became terrified, tore away from his mother, and ran back upstairs. Suddenly he appeared at a smoke-filled windrow, crying like crazy. His father, outside, shouted, “Jump, son, jump! I’ll catch you.” The boy cried, “But daddy, I can’t see you.” “I know,” his father called, “I know, But I can see you.”
Currently Listening to: Your Love Never Fails by Jesus Culture ft. Chris Quilala
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