Good morning…
What is God saying to you from the gaping hole between us? This is what I hear right now from my side of the gap.
God lives on my side and God lives on yours.
Leaning into our LORD, we are buffered by God’s living love.
You are not designed to meet my needs and I cannot meet yours. Our deepest desires are met as we surrender our daily lives to the One God who loves us equally.
So where does that put us? Do we…get a better break than the others?
Not really. Basically, all of us, whether insiders or outsiders, start out in identical conditions, which is to say that we all start out as sinners. Scripture leaves no doubt about it: There’s nobody living right, not even one, nobody who knows the score, nobody alert for God.
They’ve all taken the wrong turn; they’ve all wandered down blind alleys. No one’s living right; I can’t find a single one. Their throats are gaping graves, their tongues slick as mudslides. Every word they speak is tinged with poison. They open their mouths and pollute the air. They race for the honor of sinner-of-the-year, litter the land with heartbreak and ruin, Don’t know the first thing about living with others. They never give God the time of day.
This makes it clear, doesn’t it, that whatever is written in these Scriptures is not what God says about others but to us to whom these Scriptures were addressed in the first place! And it’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we’re sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else?
Our involvement with God’s revelation doesn’t put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else’s sin (Romans 3:9-20, MSG).
We must face our own complicity, our collusion, our cooperation, our collaboration with this sinful human nature. As we listen to the God who sits in the middle of our sinking boat, we hear ancient wisdom keeping us afloat.
God lives on my side and God lives on yours.
Leaning into our LORD, we are buffered by God’s living love.
You are not designed to meet my needs and I cannot meet yours. Our deepest desires are met as we surrender our daily lives to the One God who loves us equally.
…Sue…
