This is our fourth time highlighting the writing of Susan Barnes who mixes book reviews with devotional articles. Click the headers for each of these to read them at her eponymous website.
He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. Mark 14:33-34
I was flicking through some children’s church resources when it struck me that all the disturbing stories about Jesus were absent. The uncomfortable things he said had been toned down. His anger, frustrations and sadness weren’t even mentioned and his joy was either toned down or missing altogether.
Understandably, this happens since Jesus’ teaching was for adults, not small children, but I wonder if we do our children a disservice by only teaching them about the comfortable things Jesus said and did. If these children grow up and leave the church with no more than a childish understanding of Jesus, they have a very incomplete picture of him.
Throughout the New Testament, we see Jesus experience the whole gamut of human emotions. From hunger and thirst to deep depression, to simply being tired. We see him experience hurts and frustrations, as well as being full of joy. Some thought he was just a good teacher and we see him attract great crowds. But we also see those same crowds leave in droves when not everything he said was palatable. Jesus was always approachable, but some left dissatisfied. He was often at the centre of controversy and threaten to upset the status quo. The religious leaders plotted for months to have him killed.
There is so much more to Jesus than we heard about as children. Jesus was fully human and experienced all our emotions. He was also God and gave his life for us.
“This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” John 15:8
I went to Israel on a study trip in 2014. Before my trip, I understood Israel was the “Promised Land,” a “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3). I didn’t expect there to be so much desert, so much desolate country, or so many rocks. I read the story of the 12 spies coming home with a single cluster of grapes carried between two poles and I imagined the whole country was extremely fertile, but these grapes came from a fairly small area—the Valley of Eshkol.
Since my visit, I loved to read prophecies which speak about the deserts and wastelands in Israel being transformed, and there are lots of them. Like this one, “He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD” (Isaiah 51:3).
When these “fertility” prophesies were given they were believed to refer to the time when the Jews would return from the Babylonian exile however, we’re still waiting for their fulfilment. In modern Israel (and even in ancient times) the authorities solved the problem of lack of water through amazing engineering feats. They store huge amounts of water underground and divert water sources to ensure adequate (but not abundant) supplies for crops and homes. Yet God still longs to bless his people with rain, not just an adequate supply, but an abundance that would turn the wastelands into gardens.
Likewise, God longs to bless us with spiritual rain, that would turn our barren Christian witness into fruitful gardens of abundance.
More of my devotions from the book of John can be found here and devotions on themes from the New Testament can be found here.
Christianity 201 