We want to preserve life at all costs. In doing so we deny death.
Death will come to us all, today, tomorrow or the next day.
Death to ourselves is one way God sanctifies us, makes us more Christlike. Our pride and sin must be killed for us to enter into any fellowship with Christ.
I worked in health care as an LPN for 10 years and during that time I witnessed our helped with patients (or their families) that wanted life extended at all costs. One case included a man whom had the death rattle for over a year, kept alive by drugs and pain relief. he was unconscious the whole time before his death. His wife was there everyday at his side. Preserving life at all costs is often a selfish and depraved action.
The pandemic as an instrument of God has done and continues to do many things in our lives and the world at large. Many of us (many Christians) already had axes to grind when we went into the pandemic and have used the Covid virus as an excuse to hate and criticize those they do not like or disagree with. Social media is ripe with this unfettered anger, pride and jealously. Self-righteousness reigns supreme for most people.
As we shift from a culture with Christian underpinnings and values we find ourselves playing the blame game. We are shifting our own personal responsibility to others. We want responsibility but we don't. We have bought into the secular notion that we can pick and choose our responsibilities and values. Morality then becomes another fantasy we can manipulate. Our transcendence then is found in a spiritual smorgasbord and with magical thinking we think we can make it a reality.
This is demonstrated in plain view by our politicians today who believe that if they repeat a lie long enough it will be so. Magical Thinking. Their followers then are gullible enough to be a party to the fantasy.
But Christ is not a person of magical thinking or fantasies. Our Lord lives fully in reality. As his followers we must do the same. We know God is sovereign and in control, not a tyrant, but as our loving heavenly father. Yet we do have responsibility in our lives.
Broken and sinful as we are even on our best days results in God uses failure and disappointment as a life-giving form of restoration. The reality of our Life in Christ is that there is failure and there is also restoration. We are part of that process if we immerse ourselves in our Lord.
How? The simple reality that is not always so simple is we must be willing to give up our pride and become totally dependent on Christ. We ALL desperately need Christ. We are not ever smart enough or strong enough to get through life on our own. Yet in our see saw battle with besetting sin we go back and forth.
Pray, confess, repent of your thinking and behavior and start a daily relationship with Christ. Christ is a person, talk to him, cry out to him!!
Christians in America have missed the reality of the Gospel in that it confronts us and connects us all at once. Evangelicals seem to prefer confrontation to connection. We then have this sad and hateful witness that many Christians now present to the world. Many so called Evangelicals in America have become a hate group.
Your time is now, today, tomorrow may not come.
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” John 15:5