"come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and i will give you rest. take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for i am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. for my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
matthew 11:28-30 (niv)
i am getting quite spooked by my quiet time material. i have always known my utmost for his highness to be characteristically biting in its relevance, but doing it intermittently for the last month as i endeavoured for the n-th time to be regular with quiet time has been eye-opening.
it showed me that God listens and answers.
just a few days ago, i was struggling with saying NO to some things. i remembered before going to sleep, i cried out to God - why can't i be like other people? i want to be normal. take those dumb thoughts out of my mind.
i borrowed the title for today's reading from utmost as this post's title. today's reading dealt exactly with what i whined. i quote verbetim.
"whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth."i don't know about you, but it is really amazing. that He bothers about the small things that i thought were random words and thoughts that flowed out of my inner frustration with the stress of school work.how petty our complaining is! our Lord begins to bring us into the place where we can have communion with Him, and we groan and say - "oh Lord, let me be like other people!"
Jesus is asking us to take one end of the yoke- "my yoke is easy, get alongside Me and we will pull together." are you identified with the Lord Jesus like that? if so, you will thank God for the pressure of His hand.
"to them that has no might He increaseth strength."
God comes and takes us out of our sentimentality, and our complaining turns into a paean of praise. the only way to know the strength of God is to take the yoke of Jesus upon us and learn of Him.
"the joy of the Lord is your strength."
where do the saints get their joy from? if we did not know some saints, we would say - "oh, he, or she, has nothing to bear." lift the veil. the fact that the peace and the light and the joy of God are there - is proof that the burden is there too. the burden God places squeezes the grapes and out comes the wine; most of us see the wine only. no power on earth or in hell can conquer the spirit of God in a human spirit - it is an inner unconquerable-ness.
if you have the whine in you, kick it out ruthlessly. it is a positive crime to be weak in God's strength.
yet i am reminded of the manifold lessons He taught me in the whole course of this semester through my participation in the bce musical. about not be obsessed with grades and doing well on my own strength. but to draw upon his wellspring of life and lean on Him.
but even as i do so, i still can't quite find it within myself why i want to do well so much. if it's not for self glorification, then how can my diligence and hard work honour God?
i guess these are some of the tensions that christians have to constantly deal with - given that we are supposed to be in this world, but not of this world. remembering our identity in Christ is perhaps the most difficult thing to do.
the call to be consistently christian in every aspect of my life reverberates one octave higher today. wow.
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