18 Nov 2016
“It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will
taste as sweet as honey.” That’s a good
way to describe our experience of the Kingdom of God. Our Lord gives us a sweet promise—eternal life,
happiness, peace, joy, love in the present.
But the work it takes to get there sure can leave us with a sour
stomach.
Before peace comes, we have to get through the trials of
forgiveness and shame and guilt in our dealings with others. Before joy can come, we have to face the darkness
of betrayal, broken promises between friends, and the heartache of people
letting us down. Before we can
experience real love, we have to experience the discomfort of realizing that
the world doesn’t revolve around me and what I want.
The Lord gives us a sweet, very sweet promise. But the path toward that promise sometimes
just makes our stomach turn. The “good
news” in this, however, is that God is with us—both in the sweetness of the
promise, and in the sourness we have to go through to get there. It’s God’s grace which makes us excited for
the promise of heaven. And it’s God’s
grace that carries us through death and into life, through sourness and into
eternal sweetness.
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