Faith In Practice

"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already." CS Lewis

CMDA Summer Institute

Once again, we thank CMDA for allowing us to reprint this devotional. Link

No Room

“…She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7Luke 2:7
English: American Standard Version (1901) - ASV
7 And she brought forth her firstborn son; and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.  

WP-Bible plugin, NIV 1984).

Jerry is a busy young Christian doctor in our community with three kids, a wife and a fine reputation. Last week I stopped him in the hall and, after a word of greeting, said to him, “Jerry, you’re looking tired lately; are you all right?” He surprised me with his openness.

“I am tired,” he responded. “The work is busy like always but it seems like I’m doing it alone. I used to feel like I was charging through my day with God at my side, but now I can hardly find Him. Even when I pray, my prayers are interrupted repeatedly by my worries of the day. My work is heavy; my family concerns are heavy; it’s as if Jesus has separated from me and I’m doing life with Him in the distance.”

We know that God will occasionally withdraw the pleasure of His presence from us so that He may work out an important character or spiritual issue in the dark. But most times we feel a distance from the Lord, it’s because we have stepped away from Him rather than the other way around.

James Stewart, named by Preaching Magazine in 1999 as the best preacher in the 20th century, was a Scottish minister who wrote a short but beautiful book entitled The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ. During my first missionary year in Nigeria, Dr. John Tarpley, a colleague in nearby Ogbomosho, gave me a copy to read. I pulled it out recently. In one chapter while speaking of the innkeeper who would not make room for Mary and Joseph, Reverend Stewart compares the innkeeper’s behavior with our own when we do not draw Jesus into our work and life experiences. He describes three attitudes that prevent the innkeeper, and us, from making room for Jesus:

“I’m too busy.”
“If I let the Christ come in, I will have to let someone else go because my rooms are full.”
“This family is poor. My heart is set on rewards that they cannot likely provide.”

Just so, in my life.

Dear Jesus,
Help me to take the steps to reduce my busyness, empty junk-filled rooms and set my heart toward you as my chief treasure.
Amen

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.   CS Lewis

Lighthouse and Meteor-NASA 

But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I Pet 4: 13

He was a tough old soldier. He had been through hell in one war and was going through hell with his illness now. Even the morphine was not fully controlling his pain.
After we had finished our medical business, he said to me, “Do you know how I can bear all of this now?”
He then showed me the screen saver on his cell phone. It was an isolated cross on a hill with glorious light behind it.
What I’m going through now is nothing compared to what He went through for me.”

Suffering is hard. When we see it in our patients, we can work philosophically and compassionately through it to help them in their pain; but it gets tougher when we the suffering is our own. Suffering hurts and we can rarely think our way around it when it is laid across our own shoulders. Whether it is a personal illness, a hurting loved one, a failure at work, a failure at home or a shattered dream, rarely can we reason around the philosophy of our own suffering and feel okay. We can become stoic in our thinking, but we cannot find much solace there.

When we suffer, our greatest hope for solace is not through our minds but through our relationships. Rather than holding on to our pain, God would have us share our pain. He would have us share our suffering with each other and He would also have us share our suffering with the One who suffered for us. When we give our pain to Jesus Christ, He holds it up to the Father, blesses it, and then gives it back transformed, with a touch of peace, a touch of purpose and a touch of His glory.

Dear God,
When I suffer, let me do so hand in hand with Jesus.
Amen

Sometimes, we in the medical field, concentrate on the unlovely. We see the disease, we identify the problem and we fix what we can. But do we see the beauty?

As CS Lewis said in The Weight of Glory:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."   

Think about the beautiful gift that God gave this man. May we find beauty in all those we encounter.