Good morning,
Praise the Lord for this beautiful day. The Lord is blessing us with abundant sunshine. Praise the Lord for the way He shines on us with His love and grace. I trust you had a wonderful and worshipful weekend. The Lord blessed us with His great love and grace in our worship yesterday, followed by an Easter banquet for the families and an Easter egg hunt with the children. Praise the Lord that we can serve Him with our hands ,our hearts and our minds. Laureen and I and some of her friends attended the Avalon concert yesterday in Binghamton. It was a huge blessing. Alice spent a long weekend in Boston with Janice & Jeremy, Micah & Simeon. Micah ate some good tasting toothpaste, she had a hangover for four days. Alice stayed with her and took care of her the whole time. One of the passages from yesterday was taken from John 3. Where we find the Gospel in a nutshell in Vs. 3:16. This is a familiar passage where Nicodemus, a religious leader comes to Jesus, by night. I call it the first Nick at Night. He comes to Jesus and enters into a religious conversation. Jesus, before whom all of our secrets are open, declares to Nicodemus what he needed to do, Jesus told him, he must be “born again.” This is one of the mustness of the Gospel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus, “out of the dark night of his soul” and Jesus shines brightly on him. Jesus transforms the religious conversation into a deep and spiritual conversation. Nicodemus finds himself, totally exposed before Jesus.
We Americans have a veritable mania for privacy. We like to erect and ensure that there is a clear barrier between the selves we project to the world, and what we do in private. It is part of our individualism; hence, one of the things we tend to fear is exposure. If people find out who we really are, what kind of movies we really like, the way we really behave when we’re not in public, what we really think... then we fear that will reveal our hypocrisy and contradictions, our fakeness and the fact that we are impostors.
At the same time, our privacy is under constant attack by the marketing industry and the government. It is alarming what you can find out about someone from a simple Google search. They seem to know what we buy, what we want, what we like, what we feel, and what our political opinions are, in great detail. And as these technologies get more sophisticated, this is only going to get more intense.
On the other hand, one of the most corrosive things that can happen in any relationship is the keeping of secrets. I’ve seen families where some were deliberately kept in the dark about some issues. Maybe they convince themselves they are trying to be protective. Most families still keep some secrets from the children, and sometimes this is for their own protection. But secrets are absolutely devastating in a relationship which is supposed to be based on trust.
So, we crave our privacy. We don’t want to be answerable to anyone else for what we do. We would rather exercise complete control over our own lmage.Jesus , who is the Truth, The Way and the Life, has no secrets. He is always making big statements beginning with the words, "I Am." It is a conscious reference to the very Name of God. When Moses asks God what God’s Name is, God says: I Am Who I Am. When the Samaritan woman in John 4, starts talking about the Messiah, Jesus states, "I am He, I who am speaking to you." John’s gospel is full of memories of Jesus using I am statements: "I am the true vine." "I am the bread of life." "I am the gate." "I am the resurrection and the life." "I am the way and the truth and the life."
Jesus pulls no punches. He has nothing to hide. You could place listening devices near Him, you could place hidden cameras around Him, you could photograph Him from a satellite, you could hire a detective to tail Him around, it wouldn’t have mattered. He couldn’t have said in private anything more offensive and outrageous than what He says for all to hear. Things like, "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise Him up on the last day."
The culmination of Jesus’ work would be when He is "lifted up." For He would fulfill and prove His true identity by dying on a Cross. This is what Jesus means when He talks about being "lifted up." He means being nailed to the Cross and literally raised up into the air. He also means being lifted up in resurrection and finally being lifted up as He ascends into heaven. The gospel is very clear in understanding that this is all one coherent, integrated, continuous movement, one great lifting up of God’s life for the life of the world. And in this lifting up, Jesus says that God’s love will be fully and finally revealed for all to see. In this act we will perceive the depth and breadth of God’s love, as if God’s nature will no longer be a secret. It will no longer be the domain of theologians, scholars, and priests. Now He will be lifted up for all to see and believe. What they will see is a broken, humiliated, dying man, convicted of blasphemy and sedition. What they will believe is that this is God’s only-begotten Son, the Light of the world, by whose death the whole world is saved from destruction.
Jesus says that when He is lifted up it will be like Moses during the sojourn of God’s people in the wilderness. At one point He lifted up the bronze image of a snake, and all who looked at it were miraculously healed of snakebite. So now all who look at the crucified Christ and believe and trust in His saving work will be healed of their mortality. They will be healed and set free of the power of death. They "will not perish but have eternal life."
When we gaze at Jesus the Crucified One and see both our own broken self and at the same time the self-offering in love of the God who created all things, then we have grasped the heart of Christianity. God identifies with us in our broken places, and our broken places are where we become identified with God. Far from being the ignoble termination of our life, death is just the beginning of our being lifted up. Death is the beginning of our resurrection. Frankly, God calls upon us all to "take up our cross and follow" Christ. God calls upon us all to be "lifted up." God calls upon us all to live without secrets a life of honesty and directness. Because whether we like it or not we will be lifted up. Our lives will be subject to examination and evaluation. We will have no secrets, in the end. Our lives will also be examined and judged by God at the end. And from God we have absolutely no secrets. Not even the imaginations of our hearts are exempt. With God there is no such thing as privacy. God knows things about us that we don’t even know. We will all be lifted up to the light and have our true selves exposed.
But the good news is that God is not looking for dirt. God is not giving us the white glove treatment here. God is not concerned with cataloging the sordid details of our secret sins. The good news is that when God looks at us, God sees only Christ. When God looks at us, God sees the beloved, only-begotten, Son. "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all;" God doesn’t know or want to know our shadow side. God sees us like a lover who only knows and accepts and embraces the best in us.
God’s true nature as self-giving, sacrificial, infinite love is revealed on the Cross, when Christ is lifted up. And when we trust in Him our true nature is also revealed... in the same person, Christ, in whom we see our true humanity. God searches our hearts and knows us in full, in every detail. And what God sees in us is not the mangled, broken, sinful, corrupt, lost beings we think we are. But God sees in us Christ, the true image of the people God made us to be.
"God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him." God promises us that "Those who believe in Him are not condemned." No one who trusts in the Son is lost. Because in trusting the Son we become one with the Son. In trusting Him we conform to His image. Then God sees Christ and loves us for His sake, just as we see Christ and love God for what He does for our sake.
Let us not fear the light. Let us not try to maintain secrets in the dark. Because "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life."
In His Light,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjhOHs5CdkY
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