Our culture has
come to value only things that are practical, things that work. Every idea or
conviction is judged by its utility: Will
it help me raise my kids, build a successful marriage, live a healthy life?
When an idea or conviction doesn’t come through, we find it easy to move on to
another product. So often, when people come to Christ, they are promised
‘victory in Jesus.’ Smiling people tell about how they once were unhappy, but
now they are filled with buoyant exultation. Broken marriages are fixed,
wayward children are returned to the straight and narrow, and depression is
banished.
God nowhere
promises us temporal prosperity, but the way he has redeemed us makes all of our trials cruciform, that is, shaped not by the circumstances themselves but
by suffering and victory of Christ…The message we
are given to proclaim is not that God has come to make our lives better, more
interesting, more influential, more virtuous, or more successful, but to bury
us and make us alive.
Michael Horton from A Place for Weakness (pp 46-47)
1 comment:
This book by Dr. Horton is so good. I took the book into the waiting room while waiting for the outcome of my wife's cancer surgery a while ago; boy, was I blessed and comforted by what he wrote there. It's a book that needs to be on every Christian's reading list.
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