Stress and Distress

Have you considered the possibility that your physical woes are the result of turning away from the path God set for you?  I know that with Job and what we learn there, we run the risk of being that poor man's miserable friends ourselves but despite that, we have to explore this possibility.  In Psalm 6, the prayer offered is a whimpering moan.  O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. Clearly God does do that; it is not absent from His relationship with us.  He does let our flesh be beaten by fleshly agony to get our attention.  Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint:  O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony.  The body is in distress.  It is flailing in pain and the Lord seems to be letting it happen.  But it is worse than that. My soul is in anguish.  How long, O Lord, how long?  We come here to the point where it is worse even that physical pain.  The soul is in torment.  Where is God?  Why has He left me like this?  What have I done?  Have I been abandoned?  Am I caught in a trap with not even heavenly help?  It is the worst of places because the Christian alone knows the agony of the silence of God.  Those without Christ live only within their simplified minds; they imagine they hear God and make it happen on their own if things get rough.  The atheists and those who just

ignore the Divine proddings never concern themselves with it.  They are contented with a lonely psyche that runs wily nilly about; unrestrained and disorganized.  But the Christian who has heard the voice of God, who has lived within the nubs of the Holy Spirit cannot rest in Divine silence.  She has to hear something.  The longer the pain, the more unfeeling the solitude, the greater the desperation...God must answer, must come to my help.  And here we find the Psalmist; at the third level of supplication.  Turn, O Lord, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love.

Have you reached that point?  Have you come to the spot where your desperation turns not to the fairness of God but to His mercy?  Has it come to that where nothing but the kindness of God will get you through to the place He has set for you?  Are you ready to bend to the will of the Holy Spirit and let Him be all your benchmarks, all your orderings?  It is strange to think that perhaps you are in distress because you have comfortably walked down a side road and gotten befuddled by your circumstances.  It seemed so free and easy, so much happenstance before.  Now you know it is Christ who has struck you down; not for His anger but for His mercy to contain you once again.  Can you take the next step?  Away from me, all you who do evil, for the Lord has heard my weeping.  When the Bible, uses the expression, "the Lord has heard", it always means that the matter is settled and His mercy has won the day.  Go back to where you got distracted by fleshly wanderings and look once again for Christ's mercy to guide you.  Our Southern friends can assert that this is true.  At the eye of the hurricane, calm is reawakened.  Stay within the eye; leave the hurricane for those who are infatuated with chaos.

Body and Soul

I was asked recently by one of my children what I thought he would be like if he had a different biological father or mother.  Of course this seems like a sensible enough question except for one misconception.  We don't exist as a person outside the body we have been given. The soul came into the man after the body was formed and not before.  Adam became a living soul or nephesh after the Lord breathed into the body the breath of life.  Before that, there was no "soul" of Adam.   There is no scriptural evidence for baby souls or incubating souls waiting somewhere for God to distribute into bodies.  Rather what we have is that the physical body initiates the birth of the soul.  Thus when the body is formed, the soul comes into place, is breathed into it by God.  The body is picked out and then the soul is created.  When the egg is fertilized by the sperm, it is a mystical moment of conception, not just with the forming of the body but the initiation of the soul as God puts life into place.  We don't exist before the body comes to be but when we are brought to life, we are from the outset God's life.  He breathes into the body its being, its soul.  David talked about the work God did knitting him together within his mother's womb and creating him stitch by stitch as it were.  But moving down just a bit in Psalm 139 to verse 16, we come to the most interesting part of this .  When God saw us in His mind before we were even formed, our days were already established; they were written in His book.  It is as if out moments are a part of our DNA; the days we have written even within our body.  But take this one step further.  Ecclesiastes 3:11 indicates that our bodies also contain eternity in them; the heart is the receptacle of forever.  The body is no mere addendum to the soul...and the soul is not as U2 implies stranded in "some skin and bones".  The body and soul are intertwined as one, each a part of the whole God established when He decided to create good.  The body is either the whipping post or idol of humanist thinking.  It must be neither.  It is created by the Creator to establish the person Christ died to save. You are peculiar in the best sense of the word.  Made by God, particular to God, defined by God, known by God, loved by God.