Praise
the Lord for the first day of Spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. It is
almost like summer in Orissa, India, the temperatures running in the 90's. One
of our friends, Sue, from England just returned back to England after spending
several weeks in Orissa. She was born in Orissa to a medical Missionary
family. Sue posted pictures of the first mango crops of the season. Here in
New York I saw a a flock of joyful and jubilant Robins in the parsonage grounds.
I gazed and gazed at them... my soul was full of joy, and I echoed the words of
John Keats, "A thing of beauty is a joy
forever".
The
Lord blessed us with a wonderful Wednesday gathering for fellowship and and
testimony. Several came forward to be prayed for. It was an Holy Evening. One
of the powerful Scriptures that was shared with me during my teen years was
from my uncle, who is gone to be with the Lord. It is found in 2 Corinthians
4. The apostle Paul wrote 2 Corinthians after surviving more than a few "train
wrecks" in his life and ministry. It's one of the least familiar of Paul's
letters, but it speaks to the harsh realities of life and about the unbreakable
faith that sustains us through difficult and dangerous times. We don't know the
particulars, but in chapter 12 Paul catalogues some of the difficulties he has
encountered during his ministry: he had been in prison, flogged, stoned,
shipwrecked, robbed, starved, and abandoned. For all of these reasons, Paul was
qualified to speak on the subject of hardship.
Paul
began chapter 4, verse 7 by claiming, "we have this treasure in jars of clay."
In this context, "we" includes not only Paul and his associates, but also, by
extension, everyone who bears the name of Christ. The treasure he's talking
about is the Gospel, not just the message of the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus, but also the power behind the message—the very
life of God available through faith in Christ. Instead of "jars of clay," some
translations read "clay pots" or "earthenware vessels." Clay pottery was the
most common material for cookware, dishes, washbasins, and storage in the first
century. Clay pots kept liquid cool and slowed the evaporation process. Clay
was easy to obtain and work with. If a pot broke, you could make or buy another
cheaply and easily. Sometimes people stored their valuables in jars of clay,
assuming that nobody would think of looking in something so ordinary to find
anything of value.
How are
we Christians like jars of clay? First of all, clay pots were quite ordinary.
They were everywhere, especially in the homes of peasants and common people.
Wealthy people used more exotic materials, such as ivory, marble, glass, or fine
wood, but regular people used clay pots. Paul created this great juxtaposition: God
has taken this great treasure, the life of Christ, and placed it in people like
you and me, who are as common and fragile as clay pots. God stores his treasure in
fragile containers—like us—to display his life-giving power.
The
harder life gets, the more conspicuous the treasure becomes. Paul
said, "We
are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed." We might say that Paul was
stressed out, Paul was hard pressed, but he didn't give in. "We're perplexed,
but not in despair," he continued. In other words, we're confused, bewildered,
and mixed up. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the complexities of life or by
some difficult decision that we become completely immobilized? Paul,
however, was perplexed, but he didn't give up. He went on, "We are persecuted,
but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed". Paul and his partners were
struck down, stressed out, picked on, and knocked down, but they always got back
up again. The world does it's worst to us, but we as Christian are still
standing, not because of who we are—we're just a bunch of clay pots—but because
of the life-giving power God placed within us. That power is never as
conspicuous as when we're going through hard times.
Paul's
unusual resume reminds us that God never promised immunity from the hurts and
hardships of life. If anything, following Christ makes things more complicated
and leaves us more vulnerable to hostility and heartache. The most obvious
evidence of the presence of God in our lives is not that we escape hardship, but
that we overcome hardship. When we feel hard pressed, perplexed, picked on, or
knocked down, it doesn't necessarily mean we are doing something wrong. On the
contrary, it probably means we are right where we are supposed to be. God
doesn't take pleasure in our hardship, nor does he afflict us with pain simply
to see how we will handle it. Still, every time we get knocked around without
breaking we show the world we have something special inside us—the life of
Christ.
In
Christ,
Brown
